A Glassiness to the Eyes: Billboard by Lisa Hirmer

×

Expand

Lisa Hirmer, "A Glassiness to the Eyes," 2017

billboard digital image

A Glassiness to the Eyes was created during a residency with the Klondike Institute of Art in Culture in Dawson City and is based on the many stories of animal encounters told to the artist while she was there. In many of these stories the gaze that passes between human and animal plays an important narrative role, the moment when some form of communication passes from one species to another and the story progresses. This visual moment of eyes meeting though seemingly simple, actually belays the deep evolutionary entanglements we have with other animals. The human mind is incredibly adept at noticing eyes looking at it and though we can never be sure of what another creature is thinking, a rapid approximation of what an animal might be thinking could make the difference between surviving an encounter or not. A Glassiness to the Eyes began as a simple experiment to see if Google's Artificial Neural Network (software being developed to recognize the content of images) could approach the human capacity to quickly notice eyes in a complex visual field. Surprisingly, the sophisticated software, confused by the patterns of leaves and light, saw eyes everywhere. The artist then combined this computer generated vision with the original photograph to create a wallpaper-like composite in which the machine's reading turns an otherwise banal forest image into an uncanny scene teeming with the gaze of many beings.