Marcus DeSieno
Recognition Patterns
« Computers are now actively seeing and interpreting the world. As a result, a whole visual language has been created that is invisible to most of us. I am interested in the visual abstraction of form that comes from this digital vision of the computer. “Recognition Patterns” is a body of work investigating the invisible architecture of computer vision in the 21st century and its impact on our freedoms. Power, farce, and absurdity are blended together in custom recognition algorithms built for, and then applied to a personal archive of found photographs from the 19th and early 20th century.
These photographs in the archive have long since lost their original meaning to time, and this series brings them into a digital sphere and transforms them through modern mechanisms of control using machine sight and facial recognition. Allusions to power and authority are embedded in each piece to ask what the future holds for us as this technology continues to evolve - for better or worse.
About the artist
Marcus DeSieno is a visual artist who is interested in how the advancement of visual technology continually changes and mediates our understanding of the world. DeSieno is particularly interested in the unseen political ideologies embedded in this technology. He received his MFA in Studio Art from the University of South Florida and is currently the Assistant Professor of Photography at Central Washington University in Ellens- burg, Washington. DeSieno’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Aperture Foundation, Center for Fine Art Photography, Candela Gallery, the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Rayko Photo Center, Center for Photography at Woodstock, and various other galleries and museums. His work has also been featured in a variety of publications including The British Journal of Photography, Boston Globe, FeatureShoot, GUP Magazine, Hyperallergic, Huffington Post, National Geographic’s Proof, PDN, Slate, Smithsonian Magazine, Washington Post and Wired. DeSieno was named a selection for Photolucida’s Critical Mass 50 and an Emerging Talent by Lensculture. His first monograph, No Man’s Land: Views From a Surveillance State, was published by Daylight Books in June of 2018.