Cinema and Machine Vision: Artificial Intelligence, Aesthetics and Spectatorship

Cinema and Machine Vision unfolds the aesthetic, epistemic, and ideological dimensions of machine-seeing films and television using computers. With its critical-technical approach, this book presents to the reader key new problems that arise as AI becomes integral to visual culture. It theorises machine through a selection of aesthetics, film theory, and applied machine learning research, dispelling widely held assumptions about computer systems designed to watch and make images on our behalf.

At its heart, Cinema and Machine Vision is an invitation for film and media scholars to critically engage with AI at a technical level, a prompt for scientists and engineers working with images and cultural data to critically reflect on where their assumptions about vision come from, and a joint recognition of the fruitful problems of working together to understand the algorithmic governance of the visual.

Daniel Chávez Heras is a Lecturer in Digital Culture and Creative Computing at King’s College London. He specialises on the computational production and analysis of visual culture combining critical frameworks in the history and theories of cinema, television, and photography, with advanced technical practice in creative and scientific computing, including applied machine learning technologies. Daniel has worked extensively in interdisciplinary design and creative industries, in Mexico and in the UK, with cultural institutions such as The British Council, and the BBC. He is a member of the Creative AI Lab, in partnership with the Serpentine Gallery, and part of the Computational Humanities Research Group at King’s College London.