Restaging Optimisation - Artistic practice for mediating the mediated smartphone user in AI camera optimisation

This contribution documents a series of artworks that explore how human and machine come together within ‘AI’ smartphone image optimisation. In smartphone camera systems, machine learning infrastructure creates a computational equivalent to various aspects of human experience, such as recognition, recollection, and anticipation. As humans interact with machine learning infrastructure through smartphone camera systems, they are mediated by these computational processes.

This exposition centres on the notion of ‘optimisation’ in this mediation, using artistic methods to give form and nuance to how images are conceived in a space between human and computational understanding of photography. These artworks include audiovisual montaging of promotional narratives about optimisation, and a series of installation works that ‘restage’ specific AI image optimisation processes: scene recognition, generative alterations, and ‘Smart’ High Dynamic Range (HDR). By weaving autoethnographic reflections on this technology between these artworks, this exposition aims to create friction with the smoothness and homogenisation of automation in machine learning infrastructure, creating gaps in which mediation can be questioned.