a work-in-progress showing by Claudius Schulze.
Friday, March 15, 2019 @6:30PM
We are witnessing the greatest upheavals of modern times: Artificial Intelligence and Global Change are fundamentally altering what we took for granted.
The project Quantified Reality: Ground Truth by German photographer Claudius Schulze is an attempt to photographically document these epoch-defining developments. Today, our world becomes understandable to the logic of machines. The tangible is turned into bits and bytes. Now, the world becomes countable – a Quantified Reality. The topic is pressing – digitisation is the oil of the 21st century.
Every day, machine cognition improves. How will Artificial Intelligence be used? What will the societal consequences be like, now that technology comprehensively penetrates everyday life? Today, digitally created and stored data exceeds in volume all information and knowledge recorded by humanity throughout the millennia hitherto. Will drones and robots replace wildlife? To tackle the complexity of the topic, Claudius proposes a photographic encyclopaedia: a series of single images and self-contained, mono-thematical chapters on narrow, well-defined sub-aspects.
The Encyclopaedia
of the
Quantified Reality
The Quantified Reality triggered a world-wide gold fever. ‘Artificial Intelligence’ is a buzz word. Every day, new start-ups are founded by hungry entrepreneurs, promising new AI applications. However, no machine is smart on its own; in fact it’s a tedious job to train them. Bangalore in India has long been famous as the world’s IT service provider. It’s a multi-billion sector, totalling 40 per cent of India’s GDP. Workers called “artificial artificial intelligence” in industry jargon annotate raw data to establish ‘Ground Truth’, every AI’s fundamental training manual. The Silicon Valley big four (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple), the self-driving car efforts of German luxury brands, and virtually every other cutting-edge technology company happily books the services in India as they are cheap and readily available.
Photographed in the glow of their laptop screens, Quantified
Reality: Ground Truth centres on a series of portraits of those that do the tough work.
Curation & Exhibition Design: Prachi Gupta, Clifford Jeffrey
Claudius Schulze© Diane van der Marel
Claudius Schulze is an artist and researcher, working with photography. His interest is in nature, technology, and the consequences of Global Change.
Claudius holds a degree in Conflict Analysis and Resolution and is pursuing a practice-led Ph.D. on artificial intelligence and mass extinction.
His latest book State of Nature explores the age of climate change and natural disasters in the European Landscape. It was selected by Rencontres de la Photographie Arles, Aperture/Paris Photo, and Prix Pictet for their respective awards.
During a previous visit to Bangalore (2016), he led a photo workshop Some in 8 Billion at the Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan that resulted in the exhibition of life-size portraits of train travelers.
