Robot Readable World

A short film I made, an experiment with machine-vision footage. I pulled it together from computer vision research: face detection, motion tracking, object recognition, scanning. A glimpse of the world as cameras and algorithms register it.

Robot Readable World. Timo Arnall 2011. 5’09”.

As machines and robots settle into the world alongside us, what can they register? What signals do they pick up from our streets, our cities, our media, from us? Computer vision captures a tiny fraction of what we see. Sometimes it echoes human perception. Often it doesn’t.

Read more about the film, and have a look at Matt Jones’ talk of the same title.

Selected coverage

The film became a touchstone for the New Aesthetic conversation in 2012. Fast Company’s Co.Design called it “a haunting piece of design fiction” and reached for Thomas Nagel’s What is it like to be a bat? to frame what the film was doing. Giampaolo Bianconi at Rhizome set the film alongside Harun Farocki’s Eye/Machine II and Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale, writing that “less than 50 years after La Région Centrale, the concept of a movie made by a robot has gained far more sinister implications”. Vice argued that anyone doubting whether computer-vision algorithms have an aura should watch it. Boing Boing picked it up the day after release, and Gizmodo‘s Jamie Condliffe followed within hours. Bruce Sterling’s Essay on the New Aesthetic (Medium, 2012) treated the film as a central visual touchstone of the moment, with two dedicated Wired Beyond the Beyond posts following: on the Matt Jones essay the film grew out of (August 2011) and on the film itself (February 2012).

It was exhibited at Lighthouse, Brighton as part of the Immaterials show (5 September – 13 October 2013), and at De Hallen Haarlem, in Dread (7 September – 24 November 2013). Sterling endorsed Dread with characteristic economy: “Hey, I’d go.”