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Abstract: This paper is about the first automated systems developed to recognize identity. While automated recognition in the twenty-first century is widely associated with images of the human face, its roots are to be found in attempts to visualize identity in other, non-figural types of trace left by human bodies, ranging as widely as shadows, astrological signs, handwriting, the prints left by palms and fingers and the acoustics of the human voice. This paper investigates one such system of recognition as it emerged from within the telecommunications industry context in the midcentury U.S. Ostensibly built to reduce human labor and cable bandwidth, Bell Labs developed three different phone devices in the 1950s to photograph, formalize and analyze the sounds of speech as they traveled through the telephony system. And while the device called “Audrey” indeed succeeded in recognizing spoken digits, it was its failure to recognize the speech contents without prior awareness of the identity of the speaker, that is to distinguish between the individuality of the speaking “medium” and their intended meaning, that arguably made the experiment a landmark in the history of machine-driven recognition. Accounting for the “noise” made by the body and the environment from which sound emanated into the device, which the lab’s technicians defined as ranging from “speech defects” to “inflection” and “background interference” proved more important than phonetic analysis in determining the intended message of given speech spectogram. Similarly to a range of experiments with noise by formalist filmmakers such as Tony Conrad, John Cage, Kurt Kren and others, it was on the principle of contingency and irreproducible uniqueness that Bell Lab technicians sought to train machine-driven intelligence.
Keywords: History of computer science, machine learning, Bell Labs, history of telecommunications, sound studies
Published in RUNG: 19.02.2024; Views: 570; Downloads: 6
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Abstract: Eszter Polonyis Vortrag behandelt frühe Systeme automatisierter Identitätserkennung. Einen Fokus bilden Experimente zur Stimmerkennung, wie sie in der Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts von US-amerikanische Telekommunikationsunternehmen unternommen wurden. Sie geht dabei auch den Verbindungen zur Arbeit mit „noise“ von Medienkünstler*innen nach, darunter Tony Conrad, John Cage und Kurt Kren.
Keywords: media studies, surveillance studies, art history, critical data studies, avant-garde and experimental art
Published in RUNG: 12.02.2024; Views: 632; Downloads: 4
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Keywords: media studies, art history, new media art, archival studies, restoration studies, museum studies
Published in RUNG: 12.02.2024; Views: 789; Downloads: 5
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Published in RUNG: 13.01.2023; Views: 1807; Downloads: 17
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Abstract: When the California-based filmmaker Thom Andersen made his documentary Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer in 1973-4, he recovered an aspect of Muybridge’s work that most viewers had not seen before. Projected on the screen at the top of the theater, these iconic nineteenth-century chronophotographs were allegedly first seen in movement. Viewers could watch as his half-clad and nude subjects lifted water buckets, walked up and down stairs, ran, stood, heaved, threw, jumped, crawled and kicked. Throughout the film, Andersen shows each action multiple times, so that an athlete, for instance, leaps his hurdle firstly slowly, then at increasing speeds. Almost none of the sequences appear in the tempo in which they might have taken place in front of the camera. And, despite this being omitted from reviews, many of the passages drop to frame rates below the minimum necessary to sustain the illusion of motion, dissolving Muybridge’s images in a pulsing, jagged flicker. If Andersen’s recovery of Muybridge’s image sequences continue to appear spectacular, this is because watching the motion studies suddenly lurch into moving images proves just how little their “movement” can be explained by a history of the “movies.” This paper examines Andersen’s film as a way into an alternate genealogy of the moving image provided through the phenomenon of the flicker. As has become increasingly clear with the publication of a recent anthology of his critical writings (Visible Press, 2017), Andersen was part of a generation of North American filmmaker whose practice and writing resonated with the academic critique of the film apparatus as it began to emerge from France in the 1960s and 1970s. The fixed temporal parameters of film consumption constituted a recurring consideration for Andersen, for whom “clocked” time literalized the destructiveness of capitalism’s “eternal present” (review of Christian Marclay’s The Clock, 2011). His recovery of Muybridge, for which a frame-by-frame projector allows Andersen to reconstruct what were this pre-cinematic recording systems’s famously arbitrary time intervals, is read within the context of such a critique but also of an emerging tradition of expanded cinema practice. To this effect, comparison is made between Andersen’s process and the efforts of Tony Conrad in the 1960s to research the frequencies at which human vision registers photocelluloid film’s flicker. Conrad’s ability to produce the flicker is ensured not by modification of the projector’s microtemporalities, which would have restricted the number of projectors on which he could show his flicker film, but through alterations at the level of the photocelluloid. Both Andersen and Conrad are shown to turn the basic apparatus into a rhythmic instrument by accessing its frame rates through what I argue is a graphic rather than filmic method.
Keywords: History of American cinema, avant-garde art, media archaeology, Eadweard Muybridge, Thom Andersen
Published in RUNG: 13.01.2023; Views: 1250; Downloads: 0
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