If the Archive Can’t Consent: Historical Dance Footage, Computer Vision, and the Ethics of AI

Event details

As part of The Body and AI series, C-DaRE invites… Kate Elswit and Harmony Bench.

If the Archive Can’t Consent: Historical Dance Footage, Computer Vision, and the Ethics of AI

Contemporary experimentation with machine vision and motion extraction tends to be based on recent footage and/or live bodies. But what happens when we engage historical dance footage as a data source? If the archive can’t consent, how might we propose a method of analysis that is not based on a politics of capture? How do historical materials defamiliarise norms of extraction, and dominant ideologies of the body on which models tend to be trained, in particular with regard to minoritarian subjects? What would it take for AI-driven computer vision to be informed by specific dance-based ways of knowing embodiment? In this conversation, Harmony Bench and Kate Elswit will share some questions that are emerging from their current research trajectory, Visceral Histories, Visual Arguments: Dance-Based Approaches to Data.

For more information, you can visit C-DaRE invites....

Image credit: “Dunham Technique: Dunham walk—slow.” Video. https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200003863/; Modeling: Nicola Plant / Visceral Histories, Visual Arguments: Dance-Based Approaches to Data.

Enquiries

For enquiries please contact Simon Ellis

ac1906@coventy.ac.uk

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