Film Theory and Machine Vision

Abstract

Abstract The history of visual cultures is periodically marked by the appearance of new images and technologies of vision, images that introduce new forms of representation, and technologies that introduce new ways of seeing, extending, and reorganizing the field of the visible. In some cases, such changes produce only marginal transformations, whereas in others the transformations are vast, tectonic shifts. This is what is happening today with three phenomena that deserve our closest attention: the new technologies of machine vision based on artificial neural networks; the presence on the internet of trillions of images that are machine-readable, in the sense that they can be processed and analyzed by technologies of machine vision; and the genuinely new types of images that may be produced through processes of machine learning. The chapter will analyze these three phenomena and their various aesthetic, epistemological, and political implications from the perspective of film theory.