Only Cloud Knows

Video Documentation

Description

"In fact, art always attempted to represent the greatest possible power, the power that ruled the world in its totality..."

― Boris Groys, Art Power

Only Cloud Knows is a Chrome extension that performs art recognition on images, as perceived through the lens of Google Cloud Vision AI, manifesting how this emerging regime attempts to capture the incalculable, incomparable, and unknown in computationally legible form—the confidence labels returned from the Vision API overlay the images as each page loads. By navigating within machine intelligence's wrong-headed perceptions, Only Cloud Knows invites users to consider the limits of this data-centric worldview: What lies beneath its threshold of recognizability? What is excluded from future possibilities? With this project, I aim to mirror how faith in the technical sightline has clouded our vision and to uncover how accelerating cognitive automation has surreptitiously short-circuited our sensory-noetic loop.

The ubiquitous cloud-shaped icon on our screens encapsulates an infinitely complex system of networks comprised of servers, routers, fiber-optic cables, data centers, and satellites, encircling the entire planet. This digital and physical infrastructure generates, aggregates, stores, transmits, and processes massive amounts of data, providing a "natural" environment for developing artificial intelligence systems at scale. Machine learning instruments deployed to the cloud enhance their capacities via giant datasets, becoming the engine of improvement in cloud-based technology's overall efficiency and effectiveness. The amalgamation of cloud computing with artificial intelligence is termed "the intelligent cloud," hegemonically controlled by a handful of leading technology corporations, and capable of inscribing more and more aspects of the world into the computational body, based on one implicit assumption: that the world is reducible to data that can be objectively analyzed and perfectly modeled.

Bibliography

• Bridle, James. New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. Verso, 2019.
• Crawford, Kate. Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. Yale University Press, 2022.
• Fisher, Anna Watkins. The Play in the System: The Art of Parasitical Resistance. Duke University Press, 2020.
• Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Zero Books, 2014.
• Harari, Yuval Noah. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Harvill Secker, 2016.
• Hui, Yuk. Art and Cosmotechnics. University of Minnesota Press, 2021.
• Naimark, Michael. “First Word Art / Last Word Art.” FineArtForum, vol. 15, no. 8, Aug. 2001.
• Stiegler, Bernard. Nanjing Lectures (2016-2019). Edited and translated by Daniel Ross, Open Humanities Press, 2020.
• Vaidhyanathan, Siva. The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry). University of California Press, 2011.
• Virilio, Paul. The Vision Machine. Translated by Julie Rose, Indiana University Press, 1994.
• Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings. Houghton Mifflin, 1950.

Installation

1. Clone the repo, or download zip (click the green Code button at the upper right of the repo contents, then select Download ZIP in the menu) and unzip it.
2. Enter the src folder, rename config.json-EXAMPLE to config.json, and specify your API key. (To create an API key, follow the instructions here.)
3. Type chrome://extensions in the Chrome Address bar, or select "Window > Extensions" from the menu bar.
4. Ensure the Developer mode switch is turned on in the top right.
5. Click the Load Unpacked button at the top left to select the OnlyCloudKnows folder.

Setup

This setup is based on an exhibition concept originally conceived and conducted by Raiden INST.

Acknowledgment

Special thanks to Daniel C. Howe for his inspirational AdLiPo software, and helpful critical comments on the prototype.

This project is supported by Raiden INST's Emerging Sci-Tech Artist Awards 2nd season in 2023. Thanks to Yu Han, Songhao Huang, and Xueqing Yu.

License

Only Cloud Knows / 只有云知道 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.