Nea Ehrlich
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
Looks Familiar: Recognizability, Realism and Robotic Vision
What do art and robotic vision have to do with each other and why is this important to consider in an era of post-truth? What can we learn about intelligence, human or otherwise, and reality through art? This presentation brings together three fields – the rising interest in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine vision in the production of artworks, the shifting notions of visual realism as apparent in contemporary fields of non-fiction, and the ethical ramifications these changes may have. Through AI artworks that question issues of recognizability and the evolving relation between machine vision and human perception, I explore transformations in the way viewers engage with, believe and understand different images that aim and claim to depict factual information. As we depart from photorealism and come to accept a wide variety of stylized imagery as containing truth value, the epistemic and ethical aspects of these images must be considered since they raise important questions about emerging relationships between humans and machines.
______
Dr. Nea Ehrlich is a lecturer in the Department of Arts at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. She completed her PhD in the Department of Art History at the University of Edinburgh and was a Polonsky postdoctoral fellow at The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. She is the author of numerous articles on animation and documentary and animation as an alternative to photorealism, and is co-editor of Drawn from Life, the 2018 anthology about animated documentaries published by Edinburgh University Press.
Her work lies at the intersection of Art History, Film Studies, Animation, Digital Media Theory, Gaming and Epistemology. In 2011 she co-organized the Animated Realities conference at the University of Edinburgh in collaboration with the Edinburgh International Film Festival. The conference was the first conference on animated documentary and included over 40 international speakers and a screening program, which Nea co-curated, in collaboration with the Edinburgh International Film Festival.