Drop #33. The Madness of Vision
From trompe-l'oeil to machinic vision: deception, omniscience, and the war on terror
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Drop #32 brings you a translated piece: The Madness of Vision" (originally "La follia del vedere"), first published in Italian on Not (Nero Editions) in March 2021. We've decided to revisit this essay, originally written at the beginning of the AI image generation boom, by translating it into English because its exploration of optical metaphors and the baroque character of our digital world is a fertile ground to understand the current rise of AI aesthetics, in different fields.
The baroque "folly of seeing" Alessandro described now manifests in drone warfare in Ukraine and Gaza, where the omniscient gaze of military technology continues to embody the deadly paradox of seeing-as-power. Meanwhile, what we now call "AI slop", from the embarrassing hallucinations in Trump's presidential communications to the surreal visual logic of Italian Brain Rot memes, demonstrates how our machine vision systems remain fundamentally baroque in their tendency toward illusion, distortion, and excess.
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Everything I see is in principle within my reach (or at least within the reach of my gaze), inscribed in the map of my "I can."
— Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Now objects look at me
— Paul Klee
Walter Benjamin in the Arcades Project states: "Each epoch, in reality, already dreams of the next one, but in dreaming it urges, with a strategy similar to the Hegelian cunning of reason, toward its own awakening." The dreams of the Baroque era, a distant and forgotten historical period, investigated by the German philosopher himself, can tell us something about the digital dreams of our present.
The Baroque is a strange, almost grotesque cultural epoch, characterized by systemic chaos and various artistic attempts to navigate this chaos. The word baroque has two probable roots. On one hand, the French baroque (modeled after the Portuguese barroco and Spanish barrueco): this word indicated pearls with irregular shapes, not spherical but ovoid, curved, or lumpy. Charles de Brosses, Count of Tournay, used the term to describe some oddities in the architecture of Palazzo Phampilii in Rome. From the beginning, therefore, there was a sense of strangeness, a shifting of classical criteria. Strangeness expressed in form, not substance.
The other root of the term is even more interesting. Baroque in Italian seems to derive from baròco, a mnemonic term from scholastic syllogistics used to remember the mode of the second figure of the syllogism:
In this syllogism, the major premise (indicated by the A in "ba") is universal affirmative, while the minor premise (indicated by the O in "ro") and the conclusion (indicated by the O in "co") are particular negatives. It is reasoning that, while not false, is nevertheless abstruse and extravagant, for example: all men are rational; some animals are not rational; some animals are not men.
The argument in baròco is an evanescent display of pure rhetoric, a convoluted word search in a self-serving expressive pursuit, an empty point that erects itself as structure. In both roots, the word baroque has a derisive and caricatural value, if not outright derogatory. The Baroque era was not experienced by its contemporaries. No man or woman of the seventeenth century ever defined themselves as baroque. The category of baroque is posterior, and in the eyes of the eighteenth century, it is loaded with derogatory value: a dark and reactionary age in which art and customs degenerated into eccentric oddities. An interlude of bad taste between the triumph of the Renaissance and the shining rationalism of the Enlightenment. Baroque art, literature, and music, for various reasons, step outside the classicist criteria of the Renaissance and, paradoxically, in their search for religious purity, come into contact with extreme worldliness.
It is Christine Buci-Glucksmann who identifies, through the arts, the theme of sight as the central and constant pivot of baroque chaos. Buci-Glucksmann's work, published in the 1980s, dialogues with postmodern philosophies and with the concept of simulation, particularly regarding Jean Baudrillard's work. The author's Baroque, however, is not reducible to postmodern themes and engages with our present and future.
The eye is "the central organ of the baroque system," and its representation recurs in various Allegories of Sight, painted by both anonymous authors and well-known painters such as Miguel March and Ribera.
The most vertiginous painting of this genre is the Allegory painted by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Rubens: in a recursive scene, the painting represents many other paintings, which are in turn reflected in the mirrors in the background. On the floor, one notices a telescope, a marvel of optics invented in the seventeenth century and a key instrument of the scientific revolution of Kepler and Galileo: the folie du voir (madness of seeing) of baroque art is fueled by, and fuels in turn, the newborn scientific enterprise. The human gaze turns, through new lenses, to the wonders of the cosmos and discovers the regularities of the universe.
Baltasar Gracián, a Jesuit writer and philosopher, in his monumental Criticón (a central work of baroque literature) extols the multiplicity of the visible and defines sight as "the noblest of the senses." "If I had a hundred eyes and a hundred hands to satisfy the curiosity of my soul, I would still not be able to do so," laments the protagonist Andrenio. The universe is a phantasmagoria, a theater of the imaginary that displays its wonders for human beings to grasp and admire. Again from the Criticón: "the great theater of the universe with 'its' balcony of vision and life."
One of the greatest baroque artists, Gianlorenzo Bernini, produced in his workshop so-called "ephemeral apparatuses" for festivals and public celebrations: this lesser-known activity is typically baroque, suspended between magnificence and ephemerality. The ephemeral apparatuses were architectures made of wood and papier-mâché, extensively decorated and enhanced with sound effects. A famous apparatus is that of 1651, built for the birth of the Dauphin of France: a composition of royal initials, a gigantic dolphin, and a cloud covered Trinità dei Monti and gave life to a pyrotechnic spectacle before self-destructing. Bernini mounted an "ephemeral" theater inside St. Peter's Basilica for the canonization of Elizabeth of Portugal. These installations, entrusted to the greatest artist of the time, show a search for an immersive theatricality that incorporates the viewer's perspective within the artwork, as well as a taste for wonder and astonishment.
On one hand, Galileo's telescope; on the other, Bernini's ephemeral machines: the baroque eye sees incredible things, reaches truths unheard of until that moment, yet also lives in the beauty of deception, in the haziness of decoration that appears and disappears in a day. Never before the Baroque has there been such awareness of the ambiguity of the gaze, of the illusion that can confuse human sight and lead it to deception.
The Baroque is indeed above all the age of anamorphism and trompe-l'oeil: optical illusions were a widespread fashion throughout Europe. Anamorphosis is "a type of pictorial representation created according to a perspective deformation that allows correct viewing from a single viewpoint (appearing deformed and incomprehensible if observed from other positions)" (Treccani Encyclopedia). An example of anamorphism is found in Cardinal Colonna's Eye by Mario Bettini, another representation of the eye that further embodies this ambiguity: on one hand, a precise, almost scientific representation of the eye; on the other, distorted, deformed, the anamorphic image of a second eye.
The trompe-l'oeil is the typical model of baroque illusion: literally "deceives-the-eye," the trompe-l'oeil is a work of bel composto, halfway between architecture and painting, that creates optical illusions. False domes, colonnades that seem dozens of meters long, three-dimensional canvases: the art of trompe-l'oeil enjoys being deceived, seeks the wonder that only the opacity of truth can give. Cardinal Pallavicino, an admirer of Bernini, says it in a letter from 1645: "and generally every professor of imitative art is all the more praiseworthy, the more he deceives." What makes baroque ambiguity more radical than a classic true/false dichotomy is the absence of a negative judgment on the false. The illusory gaze and the rigorous gaze, the trompe-l'oeil and the Galilean telescope coexist in the same vision, not coincidentally defined by Buci-Glucksmann as a folie du voir, a gaze that wants to embrace all of existence and overcome its contradictions. The oxymoronic nature of baroque seeing does not contrast science and illusion because it is precisely science that "creates its opposite"; its truths and discoveries make the spectacle of illusions possible.
The Omniscient Machine and Algorithmic Hubris
Omniscience, the totalitarian ambition of the European West, can appear here as the formation of a complete image through the removal of the invisible
— Paul Virilio
The visual dreams of the Baroque seem to still be alive in the ambitions of so-called Artificial Intelligence: a true folie de voir fuels the development of techniques in various fields, from automated warfare to image recognition.
A fundamental insight to better understand the impact of algorithms and statistical techniques of machine learning on society is to consider them as optical instruments, as lenses that allow us to see the world in a certain way. This idea takes shape in Nooscope, a fundamental text of algorithmic analysis by Matteo Pasquinelli and Vladan Joler. For Pasquinelli and Joler, when we talk about machine learning algorithms, we're talking about "a tool of knowledge magnification that helps to perceive features, patterns, and correlations across vast spaces of data beyond human reach." These devices are prostheses of human rationality, tools that increase the cognitive and visual capacities of humanity, similar to how microscopes and telescopes have brought enormous progress in biology and astronomy.
In Nooscope, Pasquinelli and Joler cite Leibniz, the quintessential baroque philosopher, who speaks of the formalization of knowledge: a good formalization is, for the German philosopher, the true keystone for increasing and enhancing human rationality. Formalization will do to the mind what optical instruments have done to sight: Leibniz is a techno-enthusiast ahead of his time, who sees in the beacon of formalized knowledge "the light that seeps through the darkness as through a crack." Caught up in the fervor of his era, Leibniz does not consider the chiaroscuro effect of these techniques.
On March 18, 2018, the baroque fervor of algorithms tragically showed its dark sides. When a self-driving SUV, put on the road by Uber, encountered Elaine Herzberg's bicycle, its statistically organized gaze failed to recognize the object and the girl, ending up hitting her. Elaine Herzberg died thirty minutes after impact. The algorithmic gaze, theoretically correct, transparent, and "objective," Leibniz's dream, revealed what Baroque artists already knew: every enhanced gaze brings with it new hallucinations.
The algorithms that killed Elaine Herzberg learned to see on their own: they did so by training on gigantic datasets containing millions of images, a visual abundance unmanageable for a human gaze and brain, which only the computing power of computers can truly manage. It was these datasets, particularly the gigantic and controversial ImageNet, that realized the ambitions of a true "machinic vision": what had begun as a summer project at MIT in the summer of 1966 took more than fifty years to achieve acceptable results. As in the anamorphic figures of baroque art, the refinement of machinic vision has brought with it new visual and statistical hallucinations: our databases are rich in prejudices, for example, and the labels that algorithms learn inherit these sad teachings. But, above all, these machines have not really achieved an overview and it still takes little to deceive them.
The optical illusions of machinic vision are technically called adversarial examples: according to OpenAI's definition, they are inputs for machine learning built specifically to deceive the machine. When a machine "sees," it does so by recognizing the pixels of each image through a series of calculations. A variation of these pixels, if done in the "right place" and while remaining invisible to the human eye, is capable of making machinic vision fail miserably.
What may seem like an irrelevant nomenclature failure can have tragic consequences, as the Uber SUV case demonstrates. As noted by Logic Mag:
"In the moments before the car hit Elaine, its AI software ran through several potential identifiers for her – including 'bicycle,' 'vehicle,' and 'other' – but ultimately was unable to recognize her as a pedestrian whose trajectory would be in a few seconds in the vehicle's collision path."
Adversarial examples can be created deliberately to hack and create serious malfunctions in machine learning systems. Companies and researchers in the field are working ardently to illuminate these blind spots of machinic vision, for example, by including adversarial examples in the learning of these machines that can prepare them to react correctly to these technical hallucinations. Far more serious is the eventuality in which these errors occur in the real world, which, beyond any human desire, often remains opaque, confusing, and liable to misunderstanding.
It's easy to mistake a monarch butterfly for a washing machine or a little bird for a jeep, in an embarrassing and almost disturbing failure of these systems' reasoning capacity. The fragility and intrinsic fallibility of algorithmic vision should make us reflect on which fields of application are suitable for these technologies.
In particular, we refer to the sector of automated warfare and the application of drones in the context of the American "War on Terror": in this case, death is the ultimate goal of automatic machines and not a tragic error. The gaze of the machines becomes a refined weapon, the baroque folie du voir pushes to its extreme, to the point where being seen equals being killed.
The world of drones has been critically investigated by Gregoire Chamayou: in chapter 4 of A Theory of the Drone, Chamayou reports the phrase of American Colonel Theodore Osowski that echoes baroque omniscient ambitions: "It's like being under God's gaze. And the light descends in the form of a Hellfire." The human gaze, the "noblest of the senses," which since the Baroque has aspired to become God's gaze, the point of omniscience, seems to be realized in the weapon of the drone, which allows 24-hour control of the enemy, to know him through patterns learned by machines, and, finally, to be able to eliminate him without getting one's hands dirty.
Pakistani men are subjected to the uninterrupted surveillance of the US army, which thousands of miles away, from the Arizona desert, never closes its eyes, employing different men every eight hours. The principle that the army wants to reach is "wide-area surveillance":
"See everything, all the time. This extension of the field of vision will likely be entrusted to new and revolutionary optical devices still in development. Equipped with such synoptic imaging systems, a drone would have at its disposal not one but dozens of high-resolution micro-cameras pointed in every direction, like the multiple facets of a fly's eye. A software system would aggregate the various images in real-time into a single overview that could be viewed in detail when necessary."
The assembly line is clear: see, analyze, surveil, kill. God's gaze is also God's judgment, a murderous flash, a signal that goes around the world and sentences the fate of a human life. What remains in this scenario of the baroque gaze? The tragic and clear awareness that a gaze is never perfect, that it brings with it new errors and new escape routes, that omniscience is, in the end, impossible. And drones, which were supposed to be the most precise weapon ever invented, the realization of man's most ambitious dreams, have killed 2,000 civilians and nearly 500 children since the beginning of the "War on Terror" to date.
Far from being objective, the machinic gaze of the drone depends on a series of statistical interpretations and decisions by its operators that end up bringing the subjective element into its deductions: these "numerical experiences," as philosopher Paul Virilio called them, end up fueling a regime of hallucinations and distorted rationality that leads to tragic errors.
An army operator has stated about his work: "You see them wake up in the morning, do their work, go to sleep at night. [...] I see mothers with children, I see fathers with children; I see fathers with mothers; I see children playing soccer." Our future will depend on how we resist this automated madness of seeing, in which areas it will be applied and with what purposes. As the Uber incident and drones in the Middle East demonstrate, we already have sensitive and risky uses for human life. The greatest illusion is to think we are far from certain dystopian scenarios, to relegate them to a distant future.
We need to wake up as soon as possible from the baroque dream of our machines. We will have to repeat to ourselves Cardinal Colonna's lesson, also valid for the algorithmic gaze: "all the more praiseworthy, the more it deceives." Only with this awareness might we perhaps awaken from the long baroque dream in which we have ended up.
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