The machine that embeds hyper-biased aesthetic preference model based on the artist's own perception of beauty.

The era of machine gaze

We've entered an era of "digital colonization" of the gaze. Aesthetic ideals are being shaped by the algorithms of the big-tech corporations. How can we come to terms with the automation of beauty assessment and debunk false but common assumption that all algorithms are objective and neutral ?

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

The vision of a cold, calculating machine gaze prompted me to create an object to draw attention to the issue of quantization of aesthetics. The project takes the form of a frame that encases a screen and nests the eye of a digital camera. Its software embeds a model of my own aesthetic judgment of people faces.

The model was trained by Wojciech Stokowiec on about 10,000 photos of faces that I rated for attractiveness on a scale from 1 to 5. Due to the relatively small and poorly normalized dataset (with large lighting differences, various shot types, noise, etc.), this model is of course fairly inaccurate—though one can ask how we can even asses and benchmark the accuracy of a model of such subjective nature, even if it was trained on a perfectly normalized dataset using compute available to big corporations ?

The Beholder allows viewers to stand eye-to-eye with a machine that evaluates their beauty-hopefully evoking a feeling of unease and reflection on the automation of aesthetic judgement, where algorithms become complex "cultural machines" shaping our collective assessment of reality.

The Critical Eye

Dziga Vertov—one of the greatest filmmakers and theorists of the Soviet montage school—said in his film Man with a Movie Camera:

“I am the mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you the world as only I see it. My path leads to the creation of a new way of looking at the world.”

His words resonate doubly here. First, like today's Silicon Valley technologists, he naively believed that technology would free us from human frailties and bring us closer to a universal, objective truth. Second, he was an ideologically engaged creator, treating the new medium as a tool to shape a new social reality. It is hard not to see parallels with contemporary debates between broadly defined conservative and progressive worldviews.

Today, however, it's not party or state programs that have the decisive influence on attitudes, tastes and values, but the algorithms crafted and deployed by IT giants. The gaze—and the politics of seeing—is being automated.

To what extent will models that judge our faces incorporate the postulates of fluid gender identification? Will our attractiveness be assessed from a heteronormative perspective, or will alternative viewpoints be included? Will feminist perspectives and critiques of the “male gaze” find a place in the models? Should we demand algorithmic pluralism that confronts different models and allows us to consciously choose the most appropriate one? What mechanisms of control and oversight should we deploy to minimize biases baked into the software?

We must keep our eyes wide open and critically examine what stares back at us.

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Project created in collaboration with Wojciech Stokowiec. The installation is currently presented as a part of permanent collection at new exhibition “The Future is Now” at Copernicus Science Centre

Photos by Maciej Jędrzejewski