Catalogue > At random

An invisible audience of software robots continually analyze content on the Internet. Political trolls and YouTube celebrities gain visibility because social media ranking algorithms promote addictive videos to the top of search and recommendation rankings. What the Robot Saw is a continuously-generated livestream film that uses contrarian algorithms to constantly curate some of the least attention-grabbing videos recently uploaded to YouTube. These videos, and their creators, are rendered largely invisible by social media algorithms. Their primary audience may be the robots that rank them. What the Robot Saw uses computer vision algorithms to curate videos and study their subjects. It focuses on first-person, camera facing narrators. The robot continually assembles its film and labels its “talking head” performers in a robo-fantastical cinematic style. The Robot titles its human subjects according to the demographically-focused feature set of Amazon Rekognition, a popular facial analysis system. In a robot-centric world, attributes like presumed age, gender, and emotion might better identify us than our names. The title is a reference to early 1900s What the Butler Saw “peep show” films. Both the butlers and the Robot got a superficial glimpse of a seductive “show;” they could not really understand the objects of their obsession.

Amy Alexander is a professor and hackernaut who has been making computationally-based art projects since the 1990s. Amy is a Professor of Computing in the Arts in the Visual Arts Department at UC San Diego. She is an algorithmic filmmaker and performer who has focused throughout her career on the fuzzy borders between media and the world. Amy’s work has frequently addressed algorithmic subjectivity in digital culture by creating transparently biased, sometimes funny alternatives. Her latest project returns to this theme — this time taking on the attention economy and social influence of algorithms used for social media rankings and facial classification. Using computer vision and machine learning-based methods of curation and production, What the Robot Saw, is a perpetual live stream that depicts the cinematic fantasy of the surveillant AI robots who “see” the social media content few humans get to experience. Amy’s art practice has spanned net art, software art, computationally-based installation, audiovisual performance, and film. Her research and practice over the years has focused on how contemporary media – from performative cinema to social media – changes along with cultural and technological shifts. Amy’s projects have been presented on the Internet, in clubs and on the street as well as in festivals and museums. She has written and lectured on software art, software as culture, and historical and contemporary audiovisual performance. She has served as a reviewer for festivals and commissions for new media art and computer music.Her recent lectures span topics including algorithmic bias and subjectivity, cultural anthropologies of gender roles in 20th and 21st century computing, and systems and disruption in 20th and 21st century media.