Signal in the Noise

This outcome consists of two process-led responses. The first, Fauna, began by feeding random patterns of coloured squares into an algorithm trained to identify objects in images, which frequently misrecognised these as wildlife. In the form of a wildlife spotting handbook, this uncanny visual interpretation foregrounds how radically the ‘black box’ of the algorithm’s understanding differs from that of the human.

The second response, Flora, began by feeding scientific image archives of plant species into photogrammetry algorithms, designed to reduce a bank of images into a single structure. In the form of botanical illustrations, the distorted representations of each species—due to the software fabricating relationships between natural and artificial elements—again explores how organic forms are interpreted in a computational process.