Working With Datasets

About

A roundtable discussion concluding Data / Set / Match, a programme exploring the crucial role of photographic datasets in the development of machine vision and artificial intelligence. 

While the first symposium, What Does The Dataset Want?, focused on the significance of the digitised image, this conversation will consider the acts of closely looking and working with datasets. Analysing the ways in which data has been collected, configured and signified, the event aims to help understand how the rise of machine learning is both exacerbating and unveiling inherited historic structures of power

This discussion will first consider the scale, accessibility and politics of image datasets that the artists experienced while working on their projects. Following this, the conversations will widen to a broad set of questions around datasets, looking, labour, language, categorisation, parameters, precarity, and futures.

Speakers include:

Philipp Schmitt, artist, designer and researcher.
xtine burrough, media artist and educator
Sabrina Starnaman, a professor at humanities department at The University of Texas at Dallas US
Everest Pipkin, drawing and software artist
Ramon Amaro, lecturer in Art and Visual Cultures of the Global South, Department of History of Art, UCL
Nicolas Malevé, visual artist, computer programmer and data activist. 
And more to be confirmed.

Recommended readings

An Introduction to Image Datasets, Nicolas Malevé
On Lacework: Watching and entire machine-learning dataset by Everest Pipkin
Recovering Lost Narrative In Epic Kitchens, by xtine burrough and Sabrina Starnaman
Tunnel Vision, by Philipp Schmitt