word.camera

The creative applications of artificial intelligence technology are becoming increasingly refined. A perfect example is this algorithm that, without human intervention, uses imagery to generate prose and poetry. Take any sort of photo you want, upload it, and the app will transpose the image into ornate text. A picture of a dead pigeon on a sidewalk might trigger a reflection on mortality; wearing a funny party hat might inspire the app to come up with a joke. This multimedia project uses artificial intelligence algorithms to generate textual descriptions of images. This could be the beginning of a new kind of camera, or a new kind of photography. There are two physical versions of this lexographic camera. The first, built using an old-fashioned film camera, prints texts and relevant passages from novels on the basis of the images it captures. The second is a fully automated pan-tilt-zoom surveillance camera that looks around for faces and describes what it sees in “spoken” words. Ross Goodwin’s is the harbinger of robots that will interpret and describe their surroundings using human terminology.