Introduction: ways of machine seeing

Abstract

How do machines, and, in particular, computational technologies, change the way we see the world? This special issue brings together researchers from a wide range of disciplines to explore the entanglement of machines and their ways of seeing from new critical perspectives. As the title makes clear, we take our point of departure in John Berger's 1972 BBC documentary series Ways of Seeing, a four-part television series of 30-min films created by Berger and producer Mike Dibb, which had an enormous impact on both popular and academic perspectives on visual culture. Berger's scripts were adapted into a book of the same name, published by Penguin also in 1972. The book consists of seven numbered essays: four using words and images; and three essays using only images. Seeing is evidently a political act, exemplified in the third episode-chapter, where images of women in early modern European painting (Pol de Limbourg, Cranach the Elder, Jan Gossaert, Tintoretto) and commercial magazines are juxtaposed to demonstrate the ways in which women are rendered as objects of the male gaze. More broadly, Berger emphasised that "the relation between what we see and what we know is never settled". In this special issue, we explore how these ideas can be understood in the light of technical developments in machine vision and algorithmic learning, and how the relations between what we see and know are further unsettled.

Topics & Concepts