Events

As part of a speaker series related to the class Artificial Intelligence & Photography, Columbia University School of Arts presents a talk by Alexey Yurenev.

Alexey Yurenev grew up in Moscow within the echoes of World War Two. His grandfather, Grigoriy Lipkin, joined the Soviet army to fight the war and took part in the liberation of Auschwitz, losing most of his family that refused to evacuate his native Smolensk. At home, he would categorically refuse to speak about his experience and would either cry or make jokes when asked about it. To fill the void left by this silence, Alexey embarked on a journey through histories, spaces and time to renegotiate a narrative of his grandfather’s time in the war. Silent Hero combines machine learning, family photographs, interviews with the last living Red Army veterans and forensic fieldwork.

Alexey has published Seeing against Seeing, an artist book based on the anti-war manifesto, “War Against War!” published in 1924 by German anarcho-pacifist Ernst Friedrich. To recreate Alexey’s grandfather’s experience at war, he trained Generative Adversarial Neural Networks (GAN) on a dataset that consisted of thousands of portraits of soldiers posing in a studio or a field. One hundred years after the first edition of the book, synthetic images present themselves as war photography without evidence that results from credible witnessing. It is here where AI’s intelligence proves to be not solely statistical but psychological—the face of war is grotesque. 

MACHINE VISION(S) is a lecture series organized by Naeem Mohaiemen, Associate Professor of Visual Arts and Concentration Head of Photography at the School of Arts at Columbia University. This lecture series is supported by Google's Artists + Machine Intelligence Research Award and the Office Of The Provost at Columbia University. It is a companion to the class Artificial Intelligence & Photography, taught by Mohaiemen at the School of the Arts.