Tom White

Purple Cabbage

2019

Tom White is a New Zealand-based artist investigating artificial intelligence and machine perception. White's artwork examines the Algorithmic Gaze: how machines see, know, and articulate the world. As machine perception becomes more pervasive in our daily lives, the world as seen by computers becomes our dominant reality. White explores this phenomenon in his work. Collaborating with AI systems, White creates physical abstract prints that are reliably classified by neural networks. White has created a drawing system that allows neural networks to produce abstract ink prints that reveal their visual concepts. These prints are recognized not only by the neural networks that created them but universally across most AI systems trained to recognize the same objects. "Neural networks have been trained to recognize thousands of individual items from everyday life, such as 'Rabbit,' 'Banana,' or 'Killer Whale,'" says White. "Using the drawing system I have provided, the neural networks directly express their own versions of these categories in simple ink drawings—creating abstract shapes that convey their understanding of the world." It is art by AI, for AI. By giving the algorithms a voice to speak in, we are better able to see the world through the eyes of a machine. White is also a lecturer teaching computational design and creative AI at the Victoria University of Wellington School of Design.