Kino-Eye Recursion

At the exhibition from September 1, 2018 to June 2, 2019

Dziga Vertov’s experimental documentary film »Man with a Movie Camera« (1929) is often regarded as the first machine vision image. Vertov claimed that this motion picture was not another attempt by a human director using a camera to narrate a preconceived story, even less to imprint a subjective position on the captured footage. On the contrary: the Soviet filmmaker took up a position where he allowed the machine to capture reality as it is, enabling the eye of the machine as the only subject in the process; a mechanical eye which observes reality.

»Kino-Eye Recursion« renders a new layer of machine vision and interpretation over Vertov’s piece. Software extracts the frames of the film (still images) and analyzes them using an online cognitive computation engine. Later, a new version of the film is reconstructed without the visual motion, just black-and-white with sound (Alloy Electric Orchestra’s soundtrack) plus a new element: text over the screen. The rendered text appropriates a well-known element from the visual language of modern films – subtitles. The new captions, displayed at the bottom of the black image, translate the missing pictures into the interpretation of the cognitive engine, which tries its best to describe what it sees in human-like language. This artwork operates as a machine interpretation of a machine interpretation.