The bulk of my research, and my PhD, is at the intersection of computer vision and art history – supervised by Sabine Suesstrunk (Image and Visual Representation Lab) and Franco Moretti (Digital Humanities Institute) at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.
John Berger popularised the ideas of Walter Benjamin in his 1972 BBC TV series, Ways of Seeing, where he showed how the way we see art was influenced by material (class, patron, profit, advertising) and technological (photography, reproduction, the 'detail' postcard) conditions. The Ways of Seeing group is formed by me, Prof Alan Blackwell (Cambridge), Dr Anne Alexander (Cambridge) and Prof Geoff Cox (Aarhus). We seek to update this analysis to computer vision, and more generally, to machine ways of seeing. We organise a yearly workshop in Cambridge called Ways of Machine Seeing.
