Ben Grosser’s Computers Watching Movies

This week, I learned about Ben Grosser’s fascinating “Computers Watching Movies” project. Grosser has computers look at several movies, and has developed software that produces a sketch to approximate how the computer is seeing what it is seeing.

Here’s an excerpt from his statement about this project:


“Computers Watching Movies shows what a computational system sees when it watches the same films that we do. The work illustrates this vision as a series of temporal sketches, where the sketching process is presented in synchronized time with the audio from the original clip. Viewers are provoked to ask how computer vision differs from their own human vision, and what that difference reveals about our culturally-developed ways of looking.”

This idea of computer vision is very thought-provoking to me. When artificial intelligence considers art, what does it perceive?

Here’s a computer watching a scene from American Beauty. Watch the rest of the videos here.

             

Computers Watching Movies (American Beauty) from benjamin grosser on Vimeo.