About Mechanical Sight

explorations in color, shape, and AI

a project from StudioRampage

Mechanical Sight is a meditation on the differences between us and AI.

I created nine images based on rules (circles, three colors, four sizes — make it beautiful). I fed these images into a program that I built to retrieve ‘embeddings’ from OpenAI, the machine readable output of the image — what the machine ‘sees’. The image is printed on top of the embedding. Double vision.

what you see

what AI sees

double vision

I think they look cool. I’m also trying to get at something.

When you and I look at an image, we see all sorts of things: peace, awe, disgust, interest. The image connects back to a vast repository of private memories — a bowl of cereal with my father on a snowy morning in our small house in Minneapolis, a basketball arching through the air, the cover of a book I once designed. All those memories and associations pour into the circles that I see in front of me.

I’ve always been a sucker for circles.

Pythagorus did say they were the most beautiful shapes.

AI systems see math. Math that is incredible and vast and incredibly impressive. These machines can articulate an image’s essential differential quality, reducing its essence to a string of numbers that point to a specific coordinate on a vast map.

AI are missing the lived texture of experience. My dad across the table in that old blue bathrobe, the snowflakes settling on our the small white yard (for instance).

The human experience — the interior reality of living as a human being — is not well documented. Our memories are not in the training data. AIs don't know what it feels like to be in love. They don't have the context window for the experience, nor is the experience in the training data.

Mechanical Sight asks you to ponder the implication of this gap between us and the thinking machines.

Notes on Production

The prints are made with a Risograph printer at RisoPop, a friendly printing studio in Amsterdam that brings people together through workshops, courses, and collaborations, celebrating the joy of Risograph printing.

The Risograph Printer is the machine that lost to the laser jet. You can think of it like an automated screen printer — you create masters, load in ink, ink is pressed onto the page, etc. There are always small mistakes — misaligned layers, ink that goes on oddly, accidental textures, indistinct memories of previous prints.

Each print is a singular object, handmade, numbered in editions of 50.