BirthMark

Abstract

BirthMark proposes an artificial intelligence model of an audience to evaluate and anticipate the audience reaction to media art. In BirthMark, human cognitive process of appreciating artwork is defined in three stages: "camouflage," "solution" and "insight." In other words, understanding the intention (solution) from hidden images (camouflage) and realizing its meaning (insight). Watching the archive video clips featuring different works by 16 artists, the A.I. in BirthMark tries to appreciate works of art in a similar way to humans. YOLO-9000, an object detection system, tracks objects in the images of the works, while ACT-R, a cognitive architecture designed to mimic the structure of the brain, reads and perceives them. The A.I.'s process of recognizing works is shown in the video and the keywords of the works found in this process appear on a small screen. At the same time, an old slide projector shows what the A.I. understands semantically about the artists' interpretations of their own work. The A.I.'s cognitive process seems to be similar to the human act of appreciating art at a glance. But in reality, the keywords that it accurately analyzes from the images are only 2 to 5 out of 300 words. The more abstract the work is, the worse the A.I's intelligibility gets. As the "birthmark" in a short story of the same title by Nathaniel Hawthorne represents, BirthMark implies that there is a realm of humans that can be hardly explained through scientific methodology.