Take care of me

Take care of me, python script, 9’12”, 2019

‘Take care of me’ is an impossibile experiment intertwining the story of the training of a neural network with that of a soldier (the uncle of the artist). The soldier’s training took place first during the Ethiopian War and then during the Second World War, on the Eastern Front. The so called artificial intelligence is based on neural networks algorithms that need training in order to perform their tasks. The training dataset and other structural parts of the model are often biased toward the dominant point of view of a male, white, heterosexual, English-speaking subject.

Overlapping and intertwining the two stories is to me a paradoxical way to explore the relationships between the individual self and the social, political, linguistic and technological structures constraining the horizons of meaning. The linguistic aspect of mathematical and algorithmic structures are highlighted in the video together with their similarity with words and terms inherited by a colonialist mindset.

 

Here the whole text.
An introduction here

 

Installation view at Art Pavillon Belgrad, July 2020

 

Thanks to Eleonora Farina and Luca Sguanci.

Bibliography
Michael A. Nielsen, Neural Networks and Deep Learning, Determination Press, 2015
Stanford University Course CS231n: Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition, Lectures and Notes, Spring 2018, http://cs231n.stanford.edu/index.html
Matteo Pasquinelli, Abnormal Encephalization in the Age of Machine Learning, e-flux, n. 75, September 2016
Ennio Flaiano, Tempo di Uccidere (Time of Kill), Italian Edition, BUR 2000
Nicola Labanca, Constructing Mussolini’s New Man in Africa? Italian Memories of the Fascist War on Ethiopia, (Italian edition), Il Mulino, 2005
Antonio Orlandi Contucci, Passato d’africa, (Italian only), Rubettino 2011
Alan Turing, Lecture to the London Mathematical Society on 20 February 1947, online at https://www.vordenker.de/downloads/turing-vorlesung.pdf