Catalogue > At random

What can structuralist film techniques contribute in the age of machine vision? In the experimental film, a robot arm investigates a 200,000 year old hand axe and an 17th century mechanical calculator (the first fully functional four stage computation device), each are placed on an octagonal mirror. The robotic arm passes through interfaces of geology, archaeology, mechanics and computation and intimately explores its own coming into being as a product of human engineering. Excerpts from the latest EU Report to the Commission on Civil Law and Robotics, published in January 2017, punctuate the video, describing the need to define the subjectivity of intelligent machines, as well as their legal status and the liabilities that derive from their implementation. The critical, uncertain and undetermined state of intelligent machines’ subjecthood emerges through the eyes of a human society themselves struggling with this ecotechnical revolution, “that leaves no aspect of society untouched”. Crucially, the set is observed by an Artificial Intelligence object recognition device, or LiDAR - a form of sense which AI systems use to perceive their haptic environment. Deep Time Machine Learning was developed collaboratively with the laboratories of robotics and surface analytics at the Bosch Corporate Research and Advanced Engineering Campus and received support from the Natural History Museum, Stuttgart and the Phillip Matthäus-Hahn Museum, Kornwestheim. Jol Thomson’s experimental film elaborates a deep history of tool use from the Paleolithic era with a trajectory to the not-too distant future of algorithmic, AI governance. The explorations of this work contribute to a contemporary media ecology, a history and philosophy of technology in machine vision, and underpins the symbiotic relationship between agential forms of geology, technology, and “intelligent beings”.

Jol Thomson is an artist, sound designer, and researcher working in the interstices between critical theory, particle physics, environmental humanities, STS, and experimental music and moving image. He is currently pursuing a practice-led Phd at the University of Westminster, London. He received his meisterschüler in Fine Art from the Städelschule, Frankfurt in 2013. In 2016 he won the MERU Art*Science Award for his a/v composition G24|0v, a collaboration with the “coldest object in the observable universe”. He has participated in a number of international residencies, and in 2016-2017 he was a fellow of the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart. Recent exhibitions include: Blind Faith: Between the Cognitive and the Visceral in Contemporary Art at the Haus Der Kunst, Munich (2018); Open Codes: Living in Digital Worlds, ZKM (Center for Art and Technology), Karlsruhe (2017-2018); and Quantum Real: Spectral Exchange at Exhibition Research Lab, Liverpool (2019).