Recognition Patterns

Computers are now actively seeing and interpreting the world. There is a whole visual language created that is invisible to most of us. I’m interested in the visual abstraction of form that comes from this digital vision of the computer. "Recognition Patterns" is a body of work investigating the invisible architecture of computer vision in the 21st century and its impact on our freedoms. Power, farce, and absurdity are blended together in custom recognition algorithms built for, and then applied to, a personal archive of found photographs from the 19th and early 20th century. These photographs in the archive have long since lost their original meaning to time and this series brings them into a digital sphere and transforms them through modern mechanisms of control using machine sight and facial recognition. Allusions to power and authority are embedded in each piece to ask what the future holds for us as this technology continues to evolve – for better or worse.