Opening Reception for “Selective Attention: Interventions into the Computational Gaze”

“Selective Attention: Interventions into the Computational Gaze”

Featuring the work of Kelsey Halliday Johnson, Lisa Marie Patzer and Roopa Vasudevan

Algorithms and computation are driving more and more of our daily decision-making processes than ever before. The digital, in many ways, can almost be considered a filter: guiding the choices we make and the opportunities we are allowed to see, rendering certain practices hypervisible and “natural” while obscuring others.

This exhibition features three artists with deep connections to Philadelphia, who surface tensions between what is visible to the computer eye and what we are able to see and interpret as human beings. The work asks the viewer to consider how the intervention of the digital into practices that have traditionally centered human vision changes the way we see, interpret and understand — and, by the same token, what could be possible if humans insisted on claiming their own gaze within processes that attempt to exclude them altogether.

This exhibition was organized by Roopa Vasudevan.

Here’s a list of books we chose for the exhibit:

• ‘Blockchain Chicken Farm’ by Xiaowei Wang (2020)

• ‘A Hacker Manifesto’ by Mackenzie Wark (2004)

• ‘The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty’ by Benjamin H. Bratton (2016)

• ‘Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence’ by Kate Crawford (2021)

• ‘How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism’ by Cory Doctorow (2021)

• ‘Revolutionary Mathematics: Artificial Intelligence, Statistics and the Logic of Capitalism’ by Justin Joque (2022)

• ‘Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right about Why You Hate Your Job’ by Gavin Mueller (2021)

• ‘Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism Is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World’ by Jathan Sadowski (2020)

• ‘What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry Into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley’
by Adrian Daub (2020)

• ‘Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest’ by Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum (2016)

• ‘Linux Pocket Guide: Essential Commands’ by Daniel J. Barrett (2016)

• ‘Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet’ by Tim Hwang (2020)

• ‘Understanding E-Carceration: Electronic Monitoring, the Surveillance State, and the Future of Mass Incarceration’ by James Kilgore (2022)

• ‘Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism’ by Jillian C. York (2022)

• ‘Identified: Facial Recognition in Feature Films’ by Joyce S. Lee

• ‘Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition’ by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun w/ Alex Barnett (2021)

• ‘Your Linux Toolbox’ by Julia Evans (2019)

• ‘Machine Learning Pocket Reference: Working with Structured Data in Python’ by Matt Harrison (2019)

• ‘The Manga Guide to Linear Algebra’ by Shin Takahashi, Iroha Inoue, and Trend-Pro Co. (2012)