Cinema and Machine Vision

Cinema and Machine Vision unfolds the aesthetic, epistemic, and ideological dimensions of machine-seeing films and television using computers. With its critical-technical approach, this book presents to the reader new problems that arise as AI becomes integral to visual culture. It theorises machine vision through a selection of aesthetics, film theory, and applied machine learning research, dispelling widely held assumptions about computer systems designed to watch and make images on our behalf. At its heart, Cinema and Machine Vision is an invitation for film and media scholars to critically engage with AI at a technical level, a prompt for scientists and engineers working with images and cultural data to critically reflect on where their assumptions about vision come from, and a joint recognition of the fruitful problems of working together to understand the algorithmic governance of the visual. Daniel Chávez Heras is a Lecturer in Digital Culture and Creative Computing at King's College London.