Recoding Art

On an October evening, the digital media researcher Gabriel Pereira sent an e-mail to Brazilian artist Bruno Moreschi. The message marked the beginning of a research that involved creating an unprecedented platform that centralized 7 comercial Artificial Intelligences to read the collection of Van Abbemuseum, a Dutch museum of contemporary art. In the results, Moreschi and Pereira looked for glitches, errors and unexpected readings by the AIs – but they also encountered algorithms that nivelate the artistic subjectivity to the capitalist logic. Underpinning it all was the crucial but invisible labour of Amazon Mechanical Turkers.