Jaana Okulov
Quantifying Qualia – Aesthetic Machine Attention in Resisting the Objectifying Tendency of Thought
100515
These images contain nothing. They might feel suffocating as the mind’s tendency to seek semantic meaning is so persistent. Where must one turn when the ordinary meanings are lost? Is it a place of safety, comfort, uncertainty, or chaos? Is it a queer position, outside categories and the normal? How is an experience formed in that new perspective?
This research develops aesthetic machine attention as an alternative to the dominant object-based approaches in contemporary machine learning. It imagines a reality where information in physiological, affective and artificial systems can emerge in diverse ways.