Created by Philipp Schmitt, “Why Would You Want to Picture It” is a sculpture and sound installation engaging with opacity of ‘black box’ machine learning algorithms.

As 2018 comes to a close, we take a moment to look back at the outstanding work done this year. From spectacular machines, intricate tools and mesmerising performances and installations to the new mediums for artistic enquiry – so many great new projects have been added to the CAN archive! With your help we selected some favourites.

The chAIr Project is a series of four chairs created using a generative neural network (GAN) trained on a dataset of iconic 20th-century chairs with the goal to “generate a classic”. The results are semi-abstract visual prompts for a human designer who used them as a starting point for actual chair design concepts. 

Created by Philipp Schmitt (with Margot Fabre), ‘Computed Curation’ is a photobook created by a computer. Taking the human editor out of the loop, it uses machine learning and computer vision tools to curate a series of photos from an archive of pictures.

Created by Stephan Bogner and Philipp Schmitt, Human Element Inc. investigates how crowdwork, such as Amazon MechanicalTurk, might be woven into everyday life in the future— and explores the topic through three speculative crowdwork services.

Created by Philipp Schmitt, Camera Restricta is a camera that locates itself via GPS and searches online for photos that have been geotagged nearby. If the camera decides that too many photos have been taken at your location, it retracts the shutter and blocks the viewfinder. You can’t take any more pictures here.

Make Longer Cables is a short film including a custom made five-axis robotic arm that is trying to escape monotony by committing suicide.