Accuracy 0.78: Reflections from an Automated Gaze

Description:

Accuracy 0.78: Reflections from an Automated Gaze is a programmed video artwork that examines how machine-learning vision encounters, classifies, and misrecognizes human and non-human presence within the urban landscape.

Filmed in Chicago, the work presents a pedestrian city through an automated gaze. Figures, vehicles, architecture, reflections, and other forms are continuously scanned and assigned computational identities, detection boxes, and numerical confidence values. The apparent precision of these measurements is repeatedly undermined by moments of uncertainty and misrecognition. What is immediately recognizable to a human observer can become ambiguous to a machine; a body can become an object, a reflection can become a subject, and the boundary between human and non-human becomes unstable.

Rather than treating these misclassifications simply as technological failures, the work makes visible the assumptions and limitations embedded within systems that attempt to organize urban life into computational categories.

For Urban Digital Canvas Shanghai, a machine’s interpretation of Chicago’s pedestrian landscape is displaced onto the digital architecture of Shanghai. The work thereby creates a dialogue between two distant urban environments through an automated gaze. The urban screen becomes a site where geography, technology, and perception intersect, asking what a machine recognizes as human, what it fails to see, and what happens when an automated gaze formed in one city is projected into another.

Additional Information:

Exhibition Site: Nanfeng City Screen 1