Lacework (Traversing a machine learning dataset)

The artwork exhibits stretched and distorted videos from a dataset called Moments in TIme.  This dataset has been collected with the intention to be used in training machines to recognizes various types of actions. The videos scraped (collected  without consent) from youtube and other video streaming platforms are manipulated by the artist also using machine learning models (neural networks). The neural network effects are both to anonymizing and giving the 3 second originals a dreamy, wondrous effect. The videos are titled with their file names and which actions they are labeled with. The labels are indicating what human interpreters, in other words Amazon Mechanical Turk click-workers, have defined the 3 second action in the video to depict. These labels might feel both familiar and strange as the actions are simplified into banal and flattening one word labels.