Automated Association (working title)
Auden Lincoln-Vogel, Dwayne Khallique Jones (United States)
The winner in the category Intermedia Artwork Concept
International Competition for the Intermedia Artwork 2018
The aim of this project is to create an augmented reality experience that replaces the user’s direct visual reality with an indirect form of vision mediated by a machine vision algorithm. A live video feed from the camera on the front of the VR headset will be processed by an algorithm that replaces each frame of original video with a visually similar image. These results will be displayed on the VR headset in real time, allowing the user to “see” and interact with their surroundings in an indirect and spatially disorienting manner. The piece explores embodiment and perception in relation to technological mediation—a realm where assumptions about technology’s passive neutrality and inevitable progress often obscure intentional or unintentional means of biasing and influencing users’ perceptions, thoughts, and actions.
The winner in this category wins an opportunity to carry out the project.
The organisers shall work with the author to prepare the project and to fund its public presentation and promotion during the next edition of the competition.
Justification of the Jury
ICIA 2018 Jury: Izabella Gustowska, Ryszard W. Kluszczyński, Michał Ostrowicki / Sidey Myoo, Mirosław Rogala, Jeffrey Shaw
The jury appreciated the novel artistic aspect of an application for mobile devices and VR headsets, as well as the possibilities offered by them in respect to the virtual reality and its relation with the real world. Automated Association Project is based on the algorithms of search engine, which allows to search the web for visually similar images. The artwork undertakes a reflection on the process of constructing reality and individual identities in digital worlds.
Artists
Auden Lincoln-Vogel is an American filmmaker whose work spans from animation to expanded cinema performances. His animations, experimental films, and live action narrative films have been screened at festivals including Slamdance Film Festival, Black Nights Film Festival, Filmfest Dresden, and the European Media Arts Festival. He is the recipient of a 2016 Fulbright Scholarship in Tallinn, Estonia, where he also received an MA in Animation from the Estonian Academy of Arts in 2019. He is currently an MFA candidate in Film and Video Production at the University of Iowa. He is available for commissions as well as collaborations with other artists, musicians and filmmakers. More of his work can be found at audenlincolnvogel.com.
Dwayne Khallique Jones is a Software Engineer experienced in building Machine Learning / Computer Vision systems, Infrastructure and growing teams. Artistically, he has recently worked on generative audio + natural language processing experiments https://freedom.radio/demo, https://a-counting.us in association with the MIT Media Lab. He has also given talks at Creative Tech Week, done experiments with geometric modeling and origami at the School for Poetic Computation, helped Midnight Commercial on the Triangular Series and has “Never Graduated” from the Recurse Center. He is happy to present the beginnings of Automated Association, an artificial intelligence providing disruption in a VR landscape.
Demo work in progress 2020
Development
Since its original conception, the project has expanded from a real-time reverse image lookup to exploring the possibilities of replacing multiple objects within the user’s field of view using image segmentation techniques that mask and identify discrete objects. Currently the project is still in the testing stage for these more complicated algorithms, although a simpler version closer to the original conception has already been successfully developed.
The impulse of this project has been to reject the seamless and opaque implementation customary of technological mediations (e.g. user-targeted advertising, curated social media newsfeeds, predictive text) and to instead strive for disorienting experiences that underscore the ways in which this mediation occurs. Within the profit-driven tech world, algorithms governing these technologies would never have been developed were it not for their successful ability to influence what we know, what we buy, what we see. Consequently, it is important that the piece reject an illusion of neutrality and any assumption that the algorithms shaping our technological experiences are disinterested, unbiased, or do not play an active role in shaping our perception and actions.
This question is particularly important to the means by which images will be selected for the reverse image lookup database, as this will determine the actual “content” of the piece and circumscribe not only the freedom of interactions the user may try to exercise in the exhibition space, but also the degree to which the system itself becomes visible as an object of scrutiny. In addition to the technical expansion of the algorithm into masking and image segmentation, these decisions about image curation remain a work in progress.

