Unknown Label by Nicolas Gourault is a video installation that investigates the visual culture and power dynamics involved in training AI vision models. These AI models rely on tens of thousands of images in order to learn how to read our world, but each and every one of these images need to be first manually annotated. It basically means that for every image that a machine learn from, a human worker somewhere has to watch it first and categorize all of its content. This very labour intensive task is outsourced to online plaforms throughout the Global South.

Nicolas Gourault, EMAP artists in residence at Werkleitz Center for Media Art, will present his project Unknown Label at his host organization. In this artist presentation, Gourault will go through the process of investigating and unfolding this globalized network of hidden labour. He will expand on some useful techniques to conduct online investigation with both open-source and closed material, and will show some parts of his work-in-progress to illustrate the process of creatively reusing and hijacking publicly available datasets of so-called "operational images" used by machines to make sense of our world.

The artist presentation takes place at Werkleitz Center for Media Art, Schleifweg 6, 06114 Halle /Saale on 4 July 2023 / 20:00 CET. Registration is not required.

More about Nicolas Gourault and his EMAP project Unknown Label here.