<<
TEXTS:
JOURNAL ARTICLES
Decay without mourning: future-thinking heritage practices (not the first author)
With Lizabé Lambrechts, Kati Lindström, Lize-Marié Hansen van der Watt, Fernanda Pitta, Nicola Deane and Leif Petersen. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 1–18, 2024.
https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2024.2417062
Distance, Transmission, and Journey in the Collective Construction of an Itaaká
With Irineu Nje'a Terena. HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society, 1, 2023.
https://doi.org/10.22501/hub.2230451
Five Experimentations in Computer Vision
British Society for the History of Science - BJHS Themes journal, 2023.
https://doi.org/10.1017/bjt.2023.6
O Museu Paulista está Fechado para Obras: Revisões críticas e colaborativas da pintura Independência ou Morte, de Pedro Américo
https://doi.org/10.1590/1982-02672023v31e9
Anais do Museu Paulista: História e Cultura Material, 2023. (only in Portuguse)
Living with Images for Large-Scale Data Sets: A Critical Pedagogy for Scaling-down
With Gabriel Pereira. Photographies journal, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2023.2189285
The emergence of contemporary computer vision coincides with the growth and dissemination of large-scale image data sets. The grandeur of such image collections has raised fascination and concern. This article critically interrogates the assumption of scale in computer vision by asking: What can be gained by scaling down and living with images from large-scale data sets? We present results from a practice-based methodology: an ongoing exchange of individual images from data sets with selected participants. The results of this empirical inquiry help to consider how a durational engagement with such images elicits profound and variously situated meanings beyond the apparent visual content used by algorithms. We adopt the lens of critical pedagogy to untangle the role of data sets in teaching and learning, thus raising two discussion points: First, regarding how the focus on scale ignores the complexity and situatedness of images, and what it would mean for algorithms to embed more reflexive ways of seeing; Second, concerning how scaling down may support a critical literacy around data sets, raising critical consciousness around computer vision. To support the dissemination of this practice and the critical development of algorithms, we have produced a teaching plan and a tool for classroom use.
We’ve Always been Antagonistic: Algorithmic Resistances and Dissidences beyond the Global North
With Gabriel Pereira, André Mintz and Giselle Beiguelman. Media International Australia journal, 2022.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X221074792
In this article we suggest that otherwise unacknowledged histories of technological antagonism can help us (artists, activists, and researchers) to more deeply appreciate the foundations on which we develop activist resistances to contemporary computing. Departing from the case of Brazil, our goal is to bridge historical and contemporary perspectives by: (1) discussing the everyday practises of technological dissidence in the country, and how appropriation has been used to resist unequal power structures; (2) presenting how particular tactical ruptures in the history of art and media activism have sought to contaminate and re-envision networked technologies; (3) exploring the particular notions of algorithmic antagonism that two contemporary projects (PretaLab/Olabi and Silo/Caipiratech) advance, and how they relate to their historical counterparts. In sum, these different threads remind us that we’ve always been antagonistic, and that recognizing a longer genealogy of technological dissidences and ruptures can strengthen current practises against algorithmic oppressions.
Platform Scams - Brazilian workers’ experiences of Dishonest and Uncertain Algorithmic Management
With Rafael Grohmann, Gabriel Pereira, Abel Guerra and Ludmilla Costhek Abilio. New Media & Society journal, 2022.
https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221099225
This article discusses how Brazilian platform workers experience and respond to platform scams through three case studies. Drawing from digital ethnographic research, vlogs/interviews of workers, and literature review, we argue for a conceptualization of “platform scam” that focuses on multiple forms of platform dishonesty and uncertainty. We characterize scam as a structuring element of the algorithmic management enacted by platform labor. The first case engages with when platforms scam workers by discussing Uber drivers’ experiences with the illusive surge pricing. The second case discusses when workers (have to) scam platforms by focusing on Amazon Mechanical Turk microworkers’ experiences with faking their identities. The third case presents when platforms lead workers to scam third parties, by engaging with how Brazilian click farm platforms’ workers use bots/fake accounts to engage with social media. Our focus on “platform scams” thus highlights the particular dimensions of faking, fraud, and deception operating in platform labor. This notion of platform scam expands and complexifies the understanding of scam within platform labor studies. Departing from workers’ experiences, we engage with the asymmetries and unequal power relations present in the algorithmic management of labor.
Historical Continuum and Normatization in Art Collections and Datasets
With Amanda Jurno and Giselle Beiguelman. Modos: Revista de História da Arte, 2022.
https://doi.org/10.20396/modos.v6i2.8667715
This article presents a set of experiments in the field of History of Art with Artificial Intelligence technologies (computer vision), carried out within the scope of demonumenta, a university outreach and research program that seeks to critically and creatively tension public memory policies. From the understanding that datasets and artistic collections are analogous practices, we questioned how to work in this intersection to subvert the normative assumptions that characterize the arrangement of art collections, databases and the discourses that their tools enunciate. We believe part of this answer lies in the critical activation of public holdings to reshape the way we train machines today. For that, we created a dataset, based on art pieces of the São Paulo Museum of the University of São Paulo (USP) available in its GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums) in the Wiki projects. The systematization of this dataset was the foundation for carrying out five analytical experiments with Artificial Intelligence algorithms, namely: Numerical Natures, Possible Landscapes, Archeology of Colors, Affirmative Album and Animated Ignorance. Those experiments evidence the colonialist continuum that elaborates the historical narrative based on normative visual patterns and parameters.
Images of Resistance: Thinking about Computer Vision AI in Surveillance Capitalism through Images of Marielle Franco
With Vinicius Ariel Arruda dos Santos, Amanda Jurno, Didiana Prata, Monique Lemos and Lucas Sequeira Nunes. Digital Culture & Society journal, 2021.
https://doi.org/10.14361/dcs-2021-070211
This article examines the ambivalent dynamics of activism in social media and online platforms. Made up of Brazilian researchers from areas such as Communication, Visual Arts and Design, Anthropology, Computer Science and Engineering, our group analysed 213,083 images shared on Instagram that are part of the hashtag #MariellePresente, an online political manifestation that arose in response to the assassination of Brazilian councilwoman Marielle Franco in 2018, an unsolved case. After collecting images with a Python programming language script, we used two Computer Vision/Artificial Intelligence tools to read them (Google Cloud Vision and YOLO Darknet). The results show the capi-talistic logics inscribed into these technologies and also shed light on the role played by both online activism and data analysis tools. Thus, the consequences of the shift of political movements online became apparent: by helping activism to find its audience, online platforms simultaneously subject its cause to demands of 21st century digital capitalism (Zuboff 2019; Srnicek 2017; Bruno 2013; Crary 2013; Beiguelman 2020).
Future Movement Future - REJECTED
With Gabriel Pereira. Surveillance & Society journal, 2021.
https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v19i4.15126
In a not-too-distant future, an anonymous researcher and their team applied for funding to develop their newest invention: a new algorithmic model for smart cameras that would allow people to analyze the movement of cars at a previously unheard-of scale. This system was said to enable new forms of predictive capabilities to emerge: the algorithm would be able to, for example, predict the route drivers wanted to take but had not yet taken—including, for example, their occult inner desires for getting away with a secret lover. A panel of academic reviewers from three different universities audited and reviewed the proposed system. All that is left are segments of the video-report resulting from this meeting, which became an urban legend among technology researchers. The short film “Future Movement Future – REJECTED” is the story of a dystopian surveillance future that was barred by institutional refusal. It importantly reminds us about how total surveillance, the “almighty algorithmic eye,” may end up seeing-predicting much less than imagining-dreaming.
_rt Moviments
With Christopher Bratton, Dalida Maria Benfield, Gabriel Pereira and Guilherme Falcão. ARTMargins journal, MIT Press, 2021.
https://doi.org/10.1162/artm_a_00294
_rt Movement(s) is an artist research project intended as a text object that materially represents the complex, relational articulation of art and history with particular emphases on the contingent relationships made by movements of different kinds: geographical migration of artists, displacement of art objects, performances, institutions/festivals, and theories/theorists. _rt Movement(s) challenges the linear developmental approach of normative art history, and its nationalist, racialized, and ethnocentric assumptions. Instead, the project argues through diverse sources, including texts, images, graphs and other visualizations for the essentially translocal and transhistorical character of works of art.
Artificial Intelligence and Institutional Critique 2.0: Unexpected Ways of Seeing with Computer Vision
With Gabriel Pereira. AI & Society journal, 2021 (ed. by Mitra Azar, Geoff Cox and Leonardo Impett).
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-01059-y
During 2018, as part of a research project funded by the Deviant Practice Grant, artist Bruno Moreschi and digital media researcher Gabriel Pereira worked with the Van Abbemuseum collection (Eindhoven, NL), reading their artworks through commercial image-recognition (computer vision) artificial intelligences from leading tech companies. The main takeaways were: somewhat as expected, AI is constructed through a capitalist and product-focused reading of the world (values that are embedded in this sociotechnical system); and that this process of using AI is an innovative way for doing institutional critique, as AI offers an untrained eye that reveals the inner workings of the art system through its glitches. This paper aims to regard these glitches as potentially revealing of the art system, and even poetic at times. We also look at them as a way of revealing the inherent fallibility of the commercial use of AI and machine learning to catalogue the world: it cannot comprehend other ways of knowing about the world, outside the logic of the algorithm. But, at the same time, due to their “glitchy” capacity to level and reimagine, these faulty readings can also serve as a new way of reading art; a new way for thinking critically about the art image in a moment when visual culture has changed form to hybrids of human–machine cognition and “machine-to-machine seeing”.
Recoding Art: Van Abbemuseum collection
Farol UFES journal, 2021. (only in Portuguse)
https://doi.org/10.47456/rf.v1i22.32691
The Brazilian Workers in Amazon Mechanical Turk: Dreams and realities of ghost workers
With Gabriel Pereira and Fabio G. Cozman. Contracampo – Brazilian Journal of Communication journal UFF, 2020.
https://doi.org/10.22409/contracampo.v39i1.38252
Contributing to research on digital platform labor in the Global South, this research surveyed 149 Brazilian workers in the Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) platform. We begin by offering a demographic overview of the Brazilian turkers and their relation with work in general. In line with previous studies of turkers in the USA and India, AMT offers poor working conditions for Brazilian turkers. Other findings we discuss include: how a large amount of the respondents affirmed they have been formally unemployed for a long period of time; the relative importance of the pay they receive to their financial subsistence; and how Brazilian turkers cannot receive their pay directly into their bank accounts due to Amazon restrictions, making them resort to creative circumventions of the system. Importantly, these “ghost workers” (Gray & Suri, 2019) find ways to support each other and self-organize through the WhatsApp group, where they also mobilize to fight for changes on the platform. As this type of work is still in formation in Brazil, and potentially will grow in the coming years, we argue this is a matter of concern.
Ways of Visiting: Non-traditional and Peripheral approaches to Museums
https://doi.org/10.22501/ruu.571956
Ruukku 12 - Studies in Artistic Research Journal, 2019.
This exposition is part of my PhD thesis that discusses the possibilities of building approaches in museological institutions, based on specific case studies that were visited and problematized during the study. The result is an experimental inventory of possibilities for critical action in these legitimating spaces of art and history - with an interest in the decoding of their discourses and strategies, revealing their power games, explicit or implicit, and often moving in the opposite direction to their procedures.
A História da _rte: Deconstruções da Narrativa Oficial da Arte
Dossiê: A cultura como direito humano: percursos e narrativas. Revista do Centro de Pesquisa e Formação do Sesc São Paulo, 2019. (only in Portuguese)
ESSAYS
Quem vê?
With Caroline Carrion and Bernardo Fontes. Revista magazine, 2022.
BOOKS
Affecting Technologies, Machining Intelligences
With Dalida María Benfield, Gabriel Pereira and Katherine Ye. Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research (CAD+SR), 2021.
Art Book - 50 contemporary artists
Menard Editions, 2014.
BOOKS - CHAPTERS
Recoding Art: Van Abbemuseum collection
With Deviant Practice Research Grant 2018-19 publication Van Abbemuseum, NL. (chapter) - More here.
PAMPHLETS
The History of _rt
Menard Editions, 2017.
EXHIBITION CATALOGUES
BioMedia: The Age of media with life-like behavior
ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, 2022.
Actions to enlarge / expand / grow the understanding of the 33rd Biennial of São Paulo
São Paulo Bienal Foundation, 2018.
Conversation in Catalogue 33rd Biennial of São Paulo
São Paulo Bienal Foundation, BR, 2018.
Ordenamentos
With Caroline Carrion. Espaço Cultural Marcantonio Vilaça, 2017.
Untitled - Mixed Technique, variable dimensions
With Paulo Miyada. Funarte, 2014.
MAGAZINES, NEWSPAPERS
Dentes descabelados: Enigmas e entrechoques nas obras de Tunga
piauí magazine, 2010. (only in Portuguese)
O Disforme: Com vidro, areia, sal, sabão, burros e urubus, Nuno Ramos tornou-se um dos mais respeitados artistas plásticos brasileiros
piauí magazine, 2010. (only in Portuguese)
TEXTS ABOUT MY PROJECTS:
Artificial Intelligence opens up possibilities, but also poses challenges to artists, Revista Fapesp ( São Paulo Research Foundation), Feb. 2025. (only in Portuguese).
In an interview, Bruno Moreschi tells us about their participation on the 33rd Bienal, and reflects on technology, Bienal de São Paulo: profiles, 2024.
The Humans Behind Machine Learning: How Machines Learn to See Our World. Mick Lehmann interviews Bruno Moreschi. Zurich University of Arts (ZHdK).
BioMedia: The Age of media with life-like behavior
ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. Edited by Peter Weibel. Spector Books, 2022.
Shannon Mattern. How to Map Nothing
Places Journal, 2021.
Rafael Grohmann. Entrevista para o projeto DigiLabour, 2019.
(only in Portuguese)
Fabio Cypriano über die 33. Biennale in São Paulo
Texte zur Kunst magazine, dez. 2018. (review, only in German)
Serrote #40
Instituto Moreira Salles, 2022. (illustration)
Serrote #31
Instituto Moreira Salles, 2018. (illustration)
Giselle Beiguelman. Impulso Historiográfico
Experience of reconstruction Hal Foster's article, 2018. (Only in Portuguese)
Ronaldo Entler. A fotografia na 33ª Bienal de São Paulo
Site da revista ZUM, BR. (review, only in Portuguese)
Caroline Carrion. Bruno Moreschi: vision and translation
Ordenamentos, Espaço Marcantonio Vilaça, Brasília, BR, 2017. (catalog text, only in Portuguese)
Jaime Lauriano. Cristina Garrido and Bruno Moreschi
SESC Sorocaba, São Paulo, BR, 2015. (catalog text)
Marta Ramos-Yzquierdo. Em Obras
São Paulo, BR, 2015. (catalog text, only in Portuguese)
Priscila Arantes. Art Book, reading room
Paço das Artes, São Paulo, BR, 2014. (catalog text)
- Art Book, Menard Editions:
Paulo Miyada. It is the thief who makes the opportunity
Paulo Kühl. Depersonalized authorship
Joseph Imorde. Encyclopaedic thinking
Paula Borghi. The image of the other
Tainá Azaredo. Shortcoming as historic dimension
Ananda Carvalho. The question that remains: an account of a debate
Camila Belchior. Work in progress
Victor da Rosa. Discernment and shortcomings
TEXTS:
JOURNAL ARTICLES
Decay without mourning: future-thinking heritage practices (not the first author)
With Lizabé Lambrechts, Kati Lindström, Lize-Marié Hansen van der Watt, Fernanda Pitta, Nicola Deane and Leif Petersen. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 1–18, 2024.
https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2024.2417062
This paper seeks to further heritage theory and practice by considering decay as a transformative process contributing to heritage formation and value. Informed by our expertise in a variety of fields bordering heritage studies, we highlight the interplay of generative and degenerative aspects in different modes of decay and suggest that partnering with decay epistemologically, artistically, academically, practically, and democratically would allow heritage to be understood not as a rearguard action against loss but rather as a creative and generative process. To explore these ideas, we draw on several cases in geographical locations with unique socio-political and socio-environmental conditions, namely South Africa, Japan, Brazil, and Antarctica. We investigate different domains including archives and museums, heritage practices, landscapes, indigenous knowledge, environmental history, and nature conservation. We argue that decay is tightly linked to the concept of authenticity and acts as a code that holds a key to both past, present and future values of heritage, depending on the positionality and institutionalisation of the interpreter.
Distance, Transmission, and Journey in the Collective Construction of an Itaaká
With Irineu Nje'a Terena. HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society, 1, 2023.
https://doi.org/10.22501/hub.2230451
This exhibition discusses the collective construction of an ancestral instrument of the Terena indigenous people in the context of the artistic residency Con/Cri/Tec, held in 2023 at Casa do Povo, in São Paulo. The functions of the itaaká instrument, as well as the process of creating it in the residency, offered decolonial opportunities for understanding the idea of "distance" beyond the non-indigenous scientific view. The first contribution to this expanded understanding of distance comes from the functions of the itaaká, in particular, that of reducing the distance between the terrestrial and the spiritual worlds, based on the idea of "transmission". The second perspective of distance analyzed here came from the experience of building the itaaká, seen in the Terena culture as part of a collective initiation ritual. The making of itaaká performed in the artistic residency showed part of this ritualistic character and how this ancestral instrument relates distance to the idea of collective construction of a "journey".
Five Experimentations in Computer Vision
British Society for the History of Science - BJHS Themes journal, 2023.
https://doi.org/10.1017/bjt.2023.6
Using images from large-scale vision datasets (LSVDs), five
practice-based studies – experimentations – were carried out to shed
light on the visual content, replications of historical continuities,
and precarious human labour behind computer vision. First, I focus my
analysis on the dominant ideologies coming from a colonial mindset and
modern taxonomy present in the visual content of the images. Then, in an
exchange with microworkers, I highlight the decontextualized practices
that these images undergo during their tagging and/or description, so
that they become data for machine learning. Finally, using as reference
two counterhegemonic initiatives from Latin America in the 1960s, I
present a pedagogical experience constituting a dataset for computer
vision based on works of art at a historical museum. The results offered
by these experimentations serve to help speculate on more radical ways
of seeing the world through machines.
O Museu Paulista está Fechado para Obras: Revisões críticas e colaborativas da pintura Independência ou Morte, de Pedro Américo
https://doi.org/10.1590/1982-02672023v31e9
Anais do Museu Paulista: História e Cultura Material, 2023. (only in Portuguse)
Living with Images for Large-Scale Data Sets: A Critical Pedagogy for Scaling-down
With Gabriel Pereira. Photographies journal, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2023.2189285
The emergence of contemporary computer vision coincides with the growth and dissemination of large-scale image data sets. The grandeur of such image collections has raised fascination and concern. This article critically interrogates the assumption of scale in computer vision by asking: What can be gained by scaling down and living with images from large-scale data sets? We present results from a practice-based methodology: an ongoing exchange of individual images from data sets with selected participants. The results of this empirical inquiry help to consider how a durational engagement with such images elicits profound and variously situated meanings beyond the apparent visual content used by algorithms. We adopt the lens of critical pedagogy to untangle the role of data sets in teaching and learning, thus raising two discussion points: First, regarding how the focus on scale ignores the complexity and situatedness of images, and what it would mean for algorithms to embed more reflexive ways of seeing; Second, concerning how scaling down may support a critical literacy around data sets, raising critical consciousness around computer vision. To support the dissemination of this practice and the critical development of algorithms, we have produced a teaching plan and a tool for classroom use.
We’ve Always been Antagonistic: Algorithmic Resistances and Dissidences beyond the Global North
With Gabriel Pereira, André Mintz and Giselle Beiguelman. Media International Australia journal, 2022.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X221074792
In this article we suggest that otherwise unacknowledged histories of technological antagonism can help us (artists, activists, and researchers) to more deeply appreciate the foundations on which we develop activist resistances to contemporary computing. Departing from the case of Brazil, our goal is to bridge historical and contemporary perspectives by: (1) discussing the everyday practises of technological dissidence in the country, and how appropriation has been used to resist unequal power structures; (2) presenting how particular tactical ruptures in the history of art and media activism have sought to contaminate and re-envision networked technologies; (3) exploring the particular notions of algorithmic antagonism that two contemporary projects (PretaLab/Olabi and Silo/Caipiratech) advance, and how they relate to their historical counterparts. In sum, these different threads remind us that we’ve always been antagonistic, and that recognizing a longer genealogy of technological dissidences and ruptures can strengthen current practises against algorithmic oppressions.
Platform Scams - Brazilian workers’ experiences of Dishonest and Uncertain Algorithmic Management
With Rafael Grohmann, Gabriel Pereira, Abel Guerra and Ludmilla Costhek Abilio. New Media & Society journal, 2022.
https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221099225
This article discusses how Brazilian platform workers experience and respond to platform scams through three case studies. Drawing from digital ethnographic research, vlogs/interviews of workers, and literature review, we argue for a conceptualization of “platform scam” that focuses on multiple forms of platform dishonesty and uncertainty. We characterize scam as a structuring element of the algorithmic management enacted by platform labor. The first case engages with when platforms scam workers by discussing Uber drivers’ experiences with the illusive surge pricing. The second case discusses when workers (have to) scam platforms by focusing on Amazon Mechanical Turk microworkers’ experiences with faking their identities. The third case presents when platforms lead workers to scam third parties, by engaging with how Brazilian click farm platforms’ workers use bots/fake accounts to engage with social media. Our focus on “platform scams” thus highlights the particular dimensions of faking, fraud, and deception operating in platform labor. This notion of platform scam expands and complexifies the understanding of scam within platform labor studies. Departing from workers’ experiences, we engage with the asymmetries and unequal power relations present in the algorithmic management of labor.
Historical Continuum and Normatization in Art Collections and Datasets
With Amanda Jurno and Giselle Beiguelman. Modos: Revista de História da Arte, 2022.
https://doi.org/10.20396/modos.v6i2.8667715
This article presents a set of experiments in the field of History of Art with Artificial Intelligence technologies (computer vision), carried out within the scope of demonumenta, a university outreach and research program that seeks to critically and creatively tension public memory policies. From the understanding that datasets and artistic collections are analogous practices, we questioned how to work in this intersection to subvert the normative assumptions that characterize the arrangement of art collections, databases and the discourses that their tools enunciate. We believe part of this answer lies in the critical activation of public holdings to reshape the way we train machines today. For that, we created a dataset, based on art pieces of the São Paulo Museum of the University of São Paulo (USP) available in its GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums) in the Wiki projects. The systematization of this dataset was the foundation for carrying out five analytical experiments with Artificial Intelligence algorithms, namely: Numerical Natures, Possible Landscapes, Archeology of Colors, Affirmative Album and Animated Ignorance. Those experiments evidence the colonialist continuum that elaborates the historical narrative based on normative visual patterns and parameters.
Images of Resistance: Thinking about Computer Vision AI in Surveillance Capitalism through Images of Marielle Franco
With Vinicius Ariel Arruda dos Santos, Amanda Jurno, Didiana Prata, Monique Lemos and Lucas Sequeira Nunes. Digital Culture & Society journal, 2021.
https://doi.org/10.14361/dcs-2021-070211
This article examines the ambivalent dynamics of activism in social media and online platforms. Made up of Brazilian researchers from areas such as Communication, Visual Arts and Design, Anthropology, Computer Science and Engineering, our group analysed 213,083 images shared on Instagram that are part of the hashtag #MariellePresente, an online political manifestation that arose in response to the assassination of Brazilian councilwoman Marielle Franco in 2018, an unsolved case. After collecting images with a Python programming language script, we used two Computer Vision/Artificial Intelligence tools to read them (Google Cloud Vision and YOLO Darknet). The results show the capi-talistic logics inscribed into these technologies and also shed light on the role played by both online activism and data analysis tools. Thus, the consequences of the shift of political movements online became apparent: by helping activism to find its audience, online platforms simultaneously subject its cause to demands of 21st century digital capitalism (Zuboff 2019; Srnicek 2017; Bruno 2013; Crary 2013; Beiguelman 2020).
Future Movement Future - REJECTED
With Gabriel Pereira. Surveillance & Society journal, 2021.
https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v19i4.15126
In a not-too-distant future, an anonymous researcher and their team applied for funding to develop their newest invention: a new algorithmic model for smart cameras that would allow people to analyze the movement of cars at a previously unheard-of scale. This system was said to enable new forms of predictive capabilities to emerge: the algorithm would be able to, for example, predict the route drivers wanted to take but had not yet taken—including, for example, their occult inner desires for getting away with a secret lover. A panel of academic reviewers from three different universities audited and reviewed the proposed system. All that is left are segments of the video-report resulting from this meeting, which became an urban legend among technology researchers. The short film “Future Movement Future – REJECTED” is the story of a dystopian surveillance future that was barred by institutional refusal. It importantly reminds us about how total surveillance, the “almighty algorithmic eye,” may end up seeing-predicting much less than imagining-dreaming.
_rt Moviments
With Christopher Bratton, Dalida Maria Benfield, Gabriel Pereira and Guilherme Falcão. ARTMargins journal, MIT Press, 2021.
https://doi.org/10.1162/artm_a_00294
_rt Movement(s) is an artist research project intended as a text object that materially represents the complex, relational articulation of art and history with particular emphases on the contingent relationships made by movements of different kinds: geographical migration of artists, displacement of art objects, performances, institutions/festivals, and theories/theorists. _rt Movement(s) challenges the linear developmental approach of normative art history, and its nationalist, racialized, and ethnocentric assumptions. Instead, the project argues through diverse sources, including texts, images, graphs and other visualizations for the essentially translocal and transhistorical character of works of art.
Artificial Intelligence and Institutional Critique 2.0: Unexpected Ways of Seeing with Computer Vision
With Gabriel Pereira. AI & Society journal, 2021 (ed. by Mitra Azar, Geoff Cox and Leonardo Impett).
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-01059-y
During 2018, as part of a research project funded by the Deviant Practice Grant, artist Bruno Moreschi and digital media researcher Gabriel Pereira worked with the Van Abbemuseum collection (Eindhoven, NL), reading their artworks through commercial image-recognition (computer vision) artificial intelligences from leading tech companies. The main takeaways were: somewhat as expected, AI is constructed through a capitalist and product-focused reading of the world (values that are embedded in this sociotechnical system); and that this process of using AI is an innovative way for doing institutional critique, as AI offers an untrained eye that reveals the inner workings of the art system through its glitches. This paper aims to regard these glitches as potentially revealing of the art system, and even poetic at times. We also look at them as a way of revealing the inherent fallibility of the commercial use of AI and machine learning to catalogue the world: it cannot comprehend other ways of knowing about the world, outside the logic of the algorithm. But, at the same time, due to their “glitchy” capacity to level and reimagine, these faulty readings can also serve as a new way of reading art; a new way for thinking critically about the art image in a moment when visual culture has changed form to hybrids of human–machine cognition and “machine-to-machine seeing”.
Recoding Art: Van Abbemuseum collection
Farol UFES journal, 2021. (only in Portuguse)
https://doi.org/10.47456/rf.v1i22.32691
The Brazilian Workers in Amazon Mechanical Turk: Dreams and realities of ghost workers
With Gabriel Pereira and Fabio G. Cozman. Contracampo – Brazilian Journal of Communication journal UFF, 2020.
https://doi.org/10.22409/contracampo.v39i1.38252
Contributing to research on digital platform labor in the Global South, this research surveyed 149 Brazilian workers in the Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) platform. We begin by offering a demographic overview of the Brazilian turkers and their relation with work in general. In line with previous studies of turkers in the USA and India, AMT offers poor working conditions for Brazilian turkers. Other findings we discuss include: how a large amount of the respondents affirmed they have been formally unemployed for a long period of time; the relative importance of the pay they receive to their financial subsistence; and how Brazilian turkers cannot receive their pay directly into their bank accounts due to Amazon restrictions, making them resort to creative circumventions of the system. Importantly, these “ghost workers” (Gray & Suri, 2019) find ways to support each other and self-organize through the WhatsApp group, where they also mobilize to fight for changes on the platform. As this type of work is still in formation in Brazil, and potentially will grow in the coming years, we argue this is a matter of concern.
Ways of Visiting: Non-traditional and Peripheral approaches to Museums
https://doi.org/10.22501/ruu.571956
Ruukku 12 - Studies in Artistic Research Journal, 2019.
This exposition is part of my PhD thesis that discusses the possibilities of building approaches in museological institutions, based on specific case studies that were visited and problematized during the study. The result is an experimental inventory of possibilities for critical action in these legitimating spaces of art and history - with an interest in the decoding of their discourses and strategies, revealing their power games, explicit or implicit, and often moving in the opposite direction to their procedures.
A História da _rte: Deconstruções da Narrativa Oficial da Arte
Dossiê: A cultura como direito humano: percursos e narrativas. Revista do Centro de Pesquisa e Formação do Sesc São Paulo, 2019. (only in Portuguese)
ESSAYS
Quem vê?
With Caroline Carrion and Bernardo Fontes. Revista magazine, 2022.
BOOKS
Affecting Technologies, Machining Intelligences
With Dalida María Benfield, Gabriel Pereira and Katherine Ye. Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research (CAD+SR), 2021.
Art Book - 50 contemporary artists
Menard Editions, 2014.
BOOKS - CHAPTERS
Recoding Art: Van Abbemuseum collection
With Deviant Practice Research Grant 2018-19 publication Van Abbemuseum, NL. (chapter) - More here.
PAMPHLETS
The History of _rt
Menard Editions, 2017.
EXHIBITION CATALOGUES
BioMedia: The Age of media with life-like behavior
ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, 2022.
Actions to enlarge / expand / grow the understanding of the 33rd Biennial of São Paulo
São Paulo Bienal Foundation, 2018.
Conversation in Catalogue 33rd Biennial of São Paulo
São Paulo Bienal Foundation, BR, 2018.
Ordenamentos
With Caroline Carrion. Espaço Cultural Marcantonio Vilaça, 2017.
Untitled - Mixed Technique, variable dimensions
With Paulo Miyada. Funarte, 2014.
MAGAZINES, NEWSPAPERS
Dentes descabelados: Enigmas e entrechoques nas obras de Tunga
piauí magazine, 2010. (only in Portuguese)
O Disforme: Com vidro, areia, sal, sabão, burros e urubus, Nuno Ramos tornou-se um dos mais respeitados artistas plásticos brasileiros
piauí magazine, 2010. (only in Portuguese)
TEXTS ABOUT MY PROJECTS:
Artificial Intelligence opens up possibilities, but also poses challenges to artists, Revista Fapesp ( São Paulo Research Foundation), Feb. 2025. (only in Portuguese).
In an interview, Bruno Moreschi tells us about their participation on the 33rd Bienal, and reflects on technology, Bienal de São Paulo: profiles, 2024.
The Humans Behind Machine Learning: How Machines Learn to See Our World. Mick Lehmann interviews Bruno Moreschi. Zurich University of Arts (ZHdK).
BioMedia: The Age of media with life-like behavior
ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. Edited by Peter Weibel. Spector Books, 2022.
Shannon Mattern. How to Map Nothing
Places Journal, 2021.
Rafael Grohmann. Entrevista para o projeto DigiLabour, 2019.
(only in Portuguese)
Fabio Cypriano über die 33. Biennale in São Paulo
Texte zur Kunst magazine, dez. 2018. (review, only in German)
Serrote #40
Instituto Moreira Salles, 2022. (illustration)
Serrote #31
Instituto Moreira Salles, 2018. (illustration)
Giselle Beiguelman. Impulso Historiográfico
Experience of reconstruction Hal Foster's article, 2018. (Only in Portuguese)
Ronaldo Entler. A fotografia na 33ª Bienal de São Paulo
Site da revista ZUM, BR. (review, only in Portuguese)
Caroline Carrion. Bruno Moreschi: vision and translation
Ordenamentos, Espaço Marcantonio Vilaça, Brasília, BR, 2017. (catalog text, only in Portuguese)
Jaime Lauriano. Cristina Garrido and Bruno Moreschi
SESC Sorocaba, São Paulo, BR, 2015. (catalog text)
Marta Ramos-Yzquierdo. Em Obras
São Paulo, BR, 2015. (catalog text, only in Portuguese)
Priscila Arantes. Art Book, reading room
Paço das Artes, São Paulo, BR, 2014. (catalog text)
- Art Book, Menard Editions:
Paulo Miyada. It is the thief who makes the opportunity
Paulo Kühl. Depersonalized authorship
Joseph Imorde. Encyclopaedic thinking
Paula Borghi. The image of the other
Tainá Azaredo. Shortcoming as historic dimension
Ananda Carvalho. The question that remains: an account of a debate
Camila Belchior. Work in progress
Victor da Rosa. Discernment and shortcomings