Take care of me, python script, 9’12”, 2019
Take Care of Me is an experimental text/video intertwining the training of a neural network with the story of Pietro Salvadori, a soldier and the artist’s great-uncle, who took part in the Italian fascist colonial war in Ethiopia (1935–1936).
The two narratives overlap without distinction, their voices merging into a single stream of language marked by blind spots, distortions of vision, and hallucinations.
The work foregrounds the linguistic dimension of these processes. Mathematical and algorithmic vocabularies — optimization, loss, training, normalization, regression — resonate with terms long sedimented in colonial discourse. Both trajectories are shaped by regimes of selection and normalization that present themselves as neutral and objective.
The video explores the colonial logic embedded in the language of AI: the pretense of autonomy of a “sovereign subject” whose freedom rests on the subjugation of racialized and colonized bodies, on the exploitation of nature, and on women’s labor.
Normalizing, regularizing, whitening
removing the correlations, becoming independent
in the dream of the eigenspace of pure freedom
a new land, a land of conquest
What initially emerged as an intuition points to a shared genealogy: modern statistics and machine learning inherit epistemic frameworks developed alongside eugenics (Galton, Pearson, Fisher).
Am I a colonial project too? asks the neural network in the video. The question has not become easier to dismiss.
Here the whole text.
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
Further reading (after-production):” Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Discriminating Data. Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition, MIT Press, 2021.