Category Archives: Algorithms

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This document, edited by Antonio Torralba, contains the notes written by Adela Barriuso describing her experience while using the LabelMe annotation tool. Mrs Barriuso has no training in computer vision. In 2007 she started to use LabelMe to systematically annotate the SUN database. The goal was to build a large database of images with all […]

Agatha Christie smoking Asger Jorn’s cigar

Ellef Prestsæter: Readers of Concreta, beware! … Engaging with you, Asger, in the context of this special issue on Vandalism and Iconoclasm calls for a strict demarcation between vandalism on the one hand and iconoclasm on the other. While the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism (SICV) connects you intimately with the concept of vandalism you […]

The Annotator

A report from one of the Cqrrelations working groups: From the start we were interested in how a Gold Standard is established, a paradoxical situation where human input is both considered a source of truth, and made invisible. Annotation here means the manual work of ‘scoring’ large amounts of data that can than be used […]

Unpredictable enough

Gödel proved that within any formal system sufficiently powerful to include ordinary arithmetic, there will always be  undecidable statements that cannot be proved true, yet cannot be proved false. Turing proved that within any formal (or mechanical) system, not only are there functions that can be given a finite description yet cannot be computed by […]

Text-ures 2

Lapsus by the Google Books OCR program. The visual approximations of the algorithm for the word arms and anus are similar enough to create some confusion. Mentioned by Nanna Bonde Thylstrup in her talk The politics of archival assemblages in the seminar Culture@Work

The gradient is a net we throw out to sea

“But classical science clung to a feeling for the opaqueness of the world, and it expected through its constructions to get back into the world. For this reason it felt obliged to seek a transcendent or transcendental foundation for its operations. Today we find—not in science but in a widely prevalent philosophy of the sciences—an […]

The past is woven into it

Hito Steyerl interviewed by Marvin Jordan Read the whole interview on Dis Magazine […] A while ago I met an extremely interesting developer in Holland. He was working on smart phone camera technology. A representational mode of thinking photography is: there is something out there and it will be represented by means of optical technology […]

Canonical scale-space

  The motivation for generating a scale-space representation of a given data set originates from the basic observation that real-world objects are composed of different structures at different scales. This implies that real-world objects, in contrast to idealized mathematical entities such as points or lines, may appear in different ways depending on the scale of […]