Automating Vision The Social Impact of the New Camera Consciousness

"The authors provide an invaluable guidebook to an emerging and at times uncanny technological landscape whose unblinking, opaque, and distributed gaze stares back at us from a growing array of devices that promise to sort, recognize, and evaluate us. Automating Vision is a crucial contribution to the new forms of visual literacy we must cultivate if we are to reap the benefits of the burgeoning field of machine vision while evading its pitfalls. It is an elegantly written, theoretically sophisticated book that is destined to become a touchstone work for our times."

Mark Andrejevic, Monash University. Author of Automated Media.

"Snapshots are automated, vision becomes machinic, cars sense more than the driver, and seeing is more like data analysis; it's in this field of transformations of media that Automating Vision offers an excellent analysis of the social aspects of artificial intelligence. Warmly recommended across the multiple contemporary disciplines that have to make sense of this situation but also to develop a fresh approach to media literacy."

Professor Jussi Parikka, University of Southampton and FAMU, Prague

"This timely volume offers a rich discussion of the social impact of smart cameras across a range of domains, ranging from surveillance and facial recognition to drones and self-driving cars. The central term "camera consciousness" grounds the productive analysis of the social interactions around and with new visual technologies. This book will be a key reference for scholars interested in the social aspects of algorithmic visual technologies."

Jill Walker Rettberg, Author, Professor and Leader of the Digital Culture Research Group at the University of Bergen, Norway