Preview
Creation Date
2026
Dimensions
28 x 24 Inches
Materials
Inkjet on Photoluster
Medium
Painting
Medium
Digital
Project Advisor
Rob Neilson, Benjamin D. Rinehart
Year of Graduation
2026
Description
High quality image of Diego Velázquez's oil painting, "Las Meninas". Image is processed as RGB values in a data table and reordered from lowest to highest in reference to each pixel's blue value.
Rights
Copyright for this work is held by the artist.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Keywords
Digital Archive, Digital Image, Photography, Portraiture, Family, Computer Vision, Data Science, Computer Science, Facial Recognition, Image Diffusion, Oil painting, Historical Painting, Velázquez
Artist Statement
Hardly knowing a world of images not shared with and platformed by machines, Violet Scott navigates her position in the world as a statistically identifiable and categorizable series of numbers in data tables generated by physical pixel sensors in a camera obscura. In the footsteps of German filmmaker Harun Farocki and contemporary American photographer Trevor Paglen, Scott explores how algorithmic analyses of images have come to dominate both the production and interpretation of images, a departure spurred by late 20th century automated missile and drone guidance technology and the prevalence of surveillance technologies in our day to day lives. Scott welcomes these developments in visual culture because she finds no other choice; she then asks the viewer to step into a visual world that blends the art gallery with an experience of observation rarely made visible to humans.
Like humans, computer vision models must learn the rules of denotation in visual representations. Researchers nurture their programs on training sets with thousands to millions of images, creating a system where the epistemic relevance of each image is made by its over or underrepresentation. This idea is not new to the art gallery; the act of framing or placing on a pedestal an art object shapes culture and communicates ideology by visual means not necessarily reliant on textual, verbal, or physical modes. An ideology, no matter how subtle or overt in its representation, then gains relevance in its iteration, an idea familiar to advertisers and propagandists but tuned and accelerated to a degree limited only by microchip size and datacenters. This comparison is not to anthropomorphize the machine, but rather to mechanamorphize the human. If digital images are both means of communicating ideology propagated by a platform, and reducible to pixel values in a matrix driven by profit margins and user engagement, the value in viewing pivots at the expense of the viewer.
These prints are works of art sorted in the software TouchDesigner and processed with the data science programming language SQL to reimagine images as RGBA values vulnerable to reinterpretation processed through layers of platforms and light measurement devices before reaching the photo frame. As machines further appropriate and elaborate on human vision, painting and art photography become another among many of images submitted to the digital archive as units of measurement for a new and algorithmic statistical distribution of aesthetics.