Representations of Machine Vision Technologies in Artworks, Games and Narratives: A Dataset

Abstract

This dataset captures cultural attitudes towards machine vision technologies as they are expressed in art, games and narratives. The dataset includes records of 500 creative works (including 77 digital games, 190 digital artworks and 233 movies, novels and other narratives) that use or represent machine vision technologies like facial recognition, deepfakes, and augmented reality. The dataset is divided into three main tables, relating to the works, to specific situations in each work involving machine vision technologies, and to the characters that interact with the technologies. Data about each work includes title, author, year and country of publication; types of machine vision technologies featured; topics the work addresses, and sentiments associated with that machine vision usage in the work. In the various works we identified 874 specific situations where machine vision is central. The dataset includes detailed data about each of these situations that describes the actions of human and non-human agents, including machine vision technologies. The dataset is the product of a digital humanities project and can be also viewed as a database at http://machine-vision.no. Data was collected by a team of topic experts who followed an analytical model developed to explore relationships between humans and technologies, inspired by posthumanist and feminist new materialist theories. The dataset as well as the more detailed database can be viewed, searched, extracted, or otherwise used or reused and is considered particularly useful for humanities and social science scholars interested in the relationship between technology and culture, and by designers, artists, and scientists developing machine vision technologies.

Machine vision situations: Tracing distributed agency

“…Taking the machine vision situation as the core unit of analysis allowed us to create structured data about the distribution of agency in machine vision interactions in a form that could be analysed quantitatively. We have begun to publish findings from our analyses of this dataset, identifying what the most common technologies are doing in the works in which they are used or represented, and what is most commonly being done to them ( Rettberg, 2022b ). For instance, drones are most commonly represented as recording, killing, transmitting and targeting and are represented as being controlled by human beings ( Rettberg, forthcoming ).…”