This Special Collection surveys how machine vision technologies are represented and narrated across different sociocultural domains. Machine vision technologies are increasingly relevant to public debates around surveillance, pandemic mitigation, automated driving, gender and racial discrimination, and more. Societies around the globe face practical and ethical questions about how these new technological assemblages should be evaluated, implemented and governed. With their anticipatory and speculative potential, cultural representations of machine vision play a key role in answering these questions. Our premise is that cultural production – including literature, art, cinema, video games, science fiction, memes, fandom and more – is a rich source for understanding the impact of machine vision technologies on society, as well as their potential future trajectory. What can we learn from how machine vision is represented, applied and discussed in digital art, video games, novels, movies, TV series, fan fiction, electronic literature, social media content and other aesthetically or culturally expressive genres? Contributors to this Special Collection will answer this question from a variety of perspectives. The Special Collection is edited by the team working on the 'Machine Vision in Everyday Life' ERC project, and gathers contributions developed during a series of workshops.

Editors: Jill Walker Rettberg (Guest Editor), Gabriele de Seta (Guest Editor), Marianne Gunderson (Guest Editor), Linda Kronman (Guest Editor)


Cultural Representations of Machine Vision

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Special Collections