Looking at the Moon

Looking at the Moon uses AI smartphone image optimisation to explore the diffusion of human and machine perspectives.

In flagship smartphone camera systems, AI creates a computational equivalent to various aspects of human experience, such as recognition, recollection, and anticipation. A hybrid phenomenological experience is produced by the interaction between the functionality of camera systems, the patterns within image datasets used to train machine learning models, and the photographic practices AI enables. Through this interaction, the boundaries between individual experiences and an anticipated ‘user’ become entangled. By tracing a scattered history of moon representation, Looking at the Moon supposes that our understanding of natural phenomena is also entangled with technologies of observation. Through repurposing the technological metaphor of the image processing ‘pipeline’, Vincent Simon Thornhill explores how our experience of the world becomes mixed with computational processes, data, memory, imagination, situated knowledge, and cultural baggage.