MORESCHI + PEREIRA

Recoding Art

Bruno Moreschi + Gabriel Pereira

“The video “Recoding Art” revolves around our research, which involved creating a platform that centralized 7 comercial Artificial Intelligences to read the contemporary art collection of the Van Abbemuseum (NL). In the results, we looked for glitches, errors and unexpected readings. We thus sought to reframe the use of machine intelligence, investigating what alternative positionalities we can assume by focusing on what’s usually considered “just an error”. Much like the theme of “DEEP FAKE”, the novel epistemological and ethical quandaries that emerge around AI are our focus, especially when they concern our relation to arts/ museums.

We found that the glitches of AI are potentially revealing of the art system, and even poetic at times. They also reveal the inherent fallibility of the commercial use of AI and machine learning to catalogue the world: it cannot comprehend other ways of knowing about the world, outside the logic of the algorithm (and capitalism). At the same time, due to their “glitchy” capacity to put everything in the same level, these “faulty” readings can also serve as a new way of reading art; a new way for thinking critically about the art image in a moment when visual culture has changed form to hybrids of human machine cognition and “machine-to machine seeing.”

Bruno Moreschi

Bruno Moreschi is a researcher and multidisciplinary artist. He currently is a Postdoctoral fellow at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo (FAUUSP), with a PhD in Arts at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), with a Capes scholarship, and exchange at the University of Arts of Helsinki (Kuva Art Academy), Finland, via CIMO Fellowship. His academic and artistic investigations are related to the deconstruction of systems and the decoding of their procedures and social practices – including here (but not only) experiences in the visual arts system and its spaces of legitimation. He currently conducts experiments in the field of Artificial Intelligence, in reverse engineering processes to carry out expanded practices of institutional critique and studies on human layers present in the training and maintenance of contemporary digital infrastructures. Projects recognized by scholarships, exhibitions and institutions such as Van Abbemuseum, 33rd Bienal de São Paulo, Rumos Award, Funarte, Capes and Fapesp. He is currently a researcher on the Histories of AI: Genealogy of Power (Cambridge University), senior researcher at the Center for Arts, Design and Social Research (CAD+SR) and one of the coordinators of GAIA / C4AI/Inova USP, a group of researchers from different fields in the construction of democratic, artistic and experimental methods in the use of programming, machine learning and Artificial Intelligences.

Gabriel Pereira

Gabriel Pereira is a Brazilian researcher and PhD Fellow at Aarhus University (Denmark). Using methods that creatively blend science and technology theories with artistic practice, his research investigates taken-for-granted data and algorithm infrastructures. His PhD research focuses in understanding how computer vision algorithms mediate our relationship with the world, and what these mediations make possible (or impossible). The research methods he deploys are experimental and collaborative, involving both forms of qualitative research (e.g. ethnography) and different forms of practice-based inquiry (e.g. arts-based, interventionist). In 2018-2019, he was a visiting Graduate Student at MIT’s Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab, collaborating with research projects of the center. Previous collaborations with Bruno Moreschi include the History of _rt project (http://historyof-rt.org/) and a commissioned project for the 33rd São Paulo Art Biennial (https://outra33. bienal.org.br/en/). He is currently a Researcher in Residence at the Center for Arts, Design and Social Research.