Automating Vision: The Social Impact of the New Camera Consciousness

163 Pages·2020·3.077 MB·English

by  Anthony McCosker and Rowan Wilken

“The authors provide an invaluable guidebook to an emerging and at times
uncanny technological landscape whose unblinking, opaque, and distributed
gaze stares back at us from a growing array of devices that promise to sort,
recognize, and evaluate us. Automating Vision is a crucial contribution to the
new forms of visual literacy we must cultivate if we are to reap the benefits
of the burgeoning field of machine vision while evading its pitfalls. It is an
elegantly written, theoretically sophisticated book that is destined to become a
touchstone work for our times.”
Mark Andrejevic , Monash University, Australia. Author of Automated Media
“Snapshots are automated, vision becomes machinic, cars sense more than the
driver, and seeing is more like data analysis; it’s in this field of transformations of
media that Automating Vision offers an excellent analysis of the social aspects of
artificial intelligence. Warmly recommended across the multiple contemporary
disciplines that have to make sense of this situation but also to develop a fresh
approach to media literacy.”
Jussi Parikka , University of Southampton, UK, and FAMU,
Prague , Czech Republic
“This timely volume offers a rich discussion of the social impact of smart cameras
across a range of domains, ranging from surveillance and facial recognition to
drones and self-driving cars. The central term ‘camera consciousness’ grounds
the productive analysis of the social interactions around and with new visual
technologies. This book will be a key reference for scholars interested in the
social aspects of algorithmic visual technologies.”
Jill Walker Rettberg , Author, Professor and Leader of
the Digital Culture Research Group at
the University of Bergen, Norway

AUTOMATING VISION
Automating Vision explores the rise of seeing machines through four case studies:
facial recognition, drone vision, mobile and locative media and driverless cars.
Proposing a conceptual lens of camera consciousness, which is drawn from the
early visual anthropology of Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, Automating
Vision accounts for the growing power and value of camera technologies and
digital image processing.
Behind the smart camera devices examined throughout the book lies a set of
increasingly integrated and automated technologies underpinned by artificial
intelligence, machine learning and image processing. Seeing machines are now
implicated in growing visual data markets and are supported by emerging layers
of infrastructure that they coproduce. In this book, Anthony McCosker and
Rowan Wilken address the social impacts, the disruptions and reconfigurations
to existing digital media ecosystems, to urban environments and to mobility
and social relations that result from the increasing automation of vision and
explore how it might be possible to ensure a safe and equitable future as we
learn to see with and negotiate the interventions of seeing machines.
This book will appeal to students and scholars in media, communication,
cultural studies, sociology of media and science and technology studies.
Anthony McCosker is Associate Professor in Media and Communication
and Deputy Director of the Social Innovation Research Institute, Swinburne
University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia.
Rowan Wilken is Associate Professor in Media and Communication and
Principal Research Fellow in the Digital Ethnography Research Centre
(DERC), RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.

AUTOMATING VISION
The Social Impact of the
New Camera Consciousness
Anthony McCosker and Rowan Wilken
First published 2020
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 Taylor & Francis
The right of Anthony McCosker and Rowan Wilken to be identified
as authors of this work has been asserted by him/her/them in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
I SBN: 978-0-367-35694-1 (hbk)
I SBN: 978-0-367-35677-4 (pbk)
I SBN: 978-0-429-34117-5 (ebk)
T ypeset in Bembo
b y Apex CoVantage, LLC
CONTENTS
List of Figures viii
Acknowledgments ix
1 Interrogating Seeing Machines 1
2 Camera Consciousness 17
3 Face Value 34
4 Automating and Augmenting Mobile Vision 55
5 Drone Vision 76
6 How Does a Car Learn to See? 94
7 Automating Visual Literacies 112
References 130
Index 148
FIGURES
1.1 Chinese AI company Megvii’s Face++ face recognition
technology presented at a Shenzhen security expo 2
2 .1 Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson working in the
mosquito room, Tambunam, 1938 19
3 .1 Graphic illustration of face recognition technology and
social credit score 47
4 .1 Mobile media, augmented reality, Project Tango 65
4 .2 Google’s Project Tango, interior mapping and
spatial awareness technology 67
5 .1 DJI Phantom 4, machine vision for automated
obstacle avoidance 85
6 .1 Lidar vision 98
7 .1 David Rokeby, The Giver of Names at the Art Gallery of
Windsor, 2008 113
7 .2 Labeled medical images; extract from the ChestX-ray8 dataset 123
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The successful completion of any book is possible only because of the generos-
ity and assistance of many people. In writing this book, we would like to thank
Mark Andrejevic, Jussi Parikka and Jill Walker Rettberg for their generous
support. Anthony would like to thank Swinburne colleagues who have pro-
vided invaluable support and input, in particular Kath Albury, Jane Farmer,
Esther Milne, Diana Bossio, Max Schleser, Arezou Soltani-Panah, Roksolana
Suchowerska, César Albarrán Torres and Dan Golding. Rowan would like
to thank RMIT colleagues who have provided input, assistance and encour-
agement, including those within the Digital Ethnography Research Centre
(DERC) and in the Technology, Communication and Policy Lab, especially
Julian Thomas, Hannah Withers and Jenny Kennedy. Others involved further
afield through collaboration and events include Jean Burgess, Nic Carah, Terri
Senft, Anna Munster, Sarah Tuck, Lila Lee-Morrison, Ysabel Gerrard, Crystal
Abidin, Brady Robards, Tama Leaver, Paul Byron, Amelia Johns, Son Vivi-
enne, Nick Davis, Lee Humphreys, Jason Farman and Jordan Frith.
We wish to express our gratitude to Erica Wetter for supporting this book,
and to Emma Sherriff and Sarah Pickles at Routledge for shepherding it through
to production. We also wish to thank the artists and organizations who have
granted us permission to reproduce the images included in this book. Every
effort has been made to trace and pay all the copyright holders.
One part of C hapter 5 appeared as “Drone Media: Unruly Systems, Radical
Empiricism and Camera Consciousness,” Culture Machine 16 (2015).
Finally, and closer to home, Anthony would like to thank Leila, Lewis and
Edith for their endless support, and Rowan would like to thank Karen, Laz,
Max and Sunday for everything.