Jeff Weber | Untitled (Neural Networks)

Jeff Weber
Untitled (Neural Networks)
Research fellowship at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp

 

Jeff Weber will soon start a two-year research fellowship at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. From September onwards, he will be working on Untitled (Neural Networks) within the research group Thinking Tools.

 

Jeff Weber’s work explores the structural conditions of what constitutes a technical image and how its use in a contemporary context is determined by the digital. Weber firmly believes that the intersection of the fields of artificial intelligence and neuroscience are profoundly pertinent to the understanding of how images operate today.

The structural and functional similarities between technologies used in AI (i.e. convolutional neural networks) and aspects of the human cognitive apparatus (i.e. nervous system) not only reinforce the idea of the “exteriorization of a cognitive instance” that occurs through the emergence of AI, but also open up the possibility to question whether and how the latter resonates and interferes with the very system that initially has constituted the model for its own structure: the Nervous System.

 

To that end, and in order to explore the recursive principles at stake, Weber intends to combine abstract 35mm films that he has previously made (with a score generated by an artificial neural network) with electroencephalography: the recording of the electrical activity of the brain that occurs in the observer through the experience of these rhythmic films.

As such, this research project constitutes a proposition about the present conditions for viewing photographs within today’s networked image regime—at a moment when computer technologies, themselves predicated upon neuroscience findings on human perception and cognition, have precipitated a mass transformation of psycho-social behavior.

 

See more at Jeff Weber and the Royal Academy of  Fine Arts Antwerp

July 20, 2024