Open discussion: Learning experiments in computer vision and visual literacy

6:00pm, Tue 06 Dec 2022

What opportunities and challenges does AI present for the art and design classroom?

This event is part of our Past Programme

This open discussion follows on from two workshops with artists and educators that took place at the Institute of Education and The Photographers' Gallery earlier this Autumn. It will build on ideas generated within the workshops, to furtherexplore how computer vision and visual literacy overlap.

Participants are invited to learn about, share and develop ideas, in dialogue with teachers and trainee teachers, andto continue the process of co-designing a platform for exploring, learning about and critiquing machine learning as it relates to the visual world.

We take our departure in John Berger's Ways of Seeing (1972), and consider the ways in which humans and machines now learn to see. Following an introduction to the project, and summary of what has taken place so far, our discussions will be framed around topics such as visual literacy, cross-disciplinary understandings of learning and training, parallels between datasets and art historical collections and classroom resources, the constraints of the curriculum and opportunities to rethink creativity.

We invite you to join the discussion.

The project is a research collaboration between the Institute of Education's Art & Design PGCE course, Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (CSNI) at London South Bank University and The Photographers' Gallery, supported by a public engagement grant from The Alan Turing Institute.

The event will be recorded.

Free, booking essential.

By booking for this event, you agree to The Photographers' Gallery's Terms & Conditions.

Event Facilitators

Yasmine Boudiaf is a researcher and creative technologist focusing on data, epistemology and the absurd. She was named one of the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics™ 2022. She produces art and research projects and consults on project design, strategy and public engagement. She is a fellow at the Ada Lovelace Institute and teh Royal Society of the Arts and is engaged in research and teaching at universities in the UK and Sweden.

Geoff Cox is Professor of Art and Computational Culture at London South Bank University, co-Director of CSNI and co-Director of MA Curating Art and Public Programmes (with Whitechapel Gallery). He has a research interest in software studies and contemporary aesthetics. He has published widely, most often in collaboration, most recently: Aesthetic Programming (Open Humanities Press, 2020), AI & Society special issue Ways of Machine Seeing (Springer, 2021), and Live Coding (MIT Press 2022).

Annie Davey works at UCL Institute of Education on the MA Art Education, Culture and Practice. She comes to the project as an advocate of teachers as researchers, and with an interest in the place of media literacy in art and design education. She is currently co-organising a series of events ‘Power, Community and Democratic Education’ at UCL IoE that examines legacies and contemporary practices of democratic education. Her research examines the intersection of models of fine art education formed under the welfare state within the marketized university, out of which has grown a collaboration with students at Coventry University on the development of a sitcom set within a contemporary art school.

Nicolas Malevé is a visual artist, computer programmer and data activist, who lives and works between Brussels and London. Nicolas has been awarded a PhD on the algorithms of vision at the London South Bank University, in collaboration with The Photographers' Gallery. In this context, he initiated the project Variations on a Glance (2015-2018), a series of workshops on the experimental production of computer vision, conducted in several international venues such as Cambridge Digital Humanities Network (Cambridge, UK), Hangar (Barcelona, Spain), Algolit (Brussels, Belgium), and Aarhus University (Aarhus, Denmark). Nicolas has contributed to exhibitions (documenta 12, Kassel; Kiasma, Helsinki), research events, and publications (MIT Press, Routledge and Presses Universitaires de Provence). Nicolas is currently a postdoc at the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University.