Drawing Out: Artistic research into machine vision, material traces, and everyday devices

Abstract:

The seminar will introduce my artistic practice and research, which explores how ubiquitous technologies can be used to reveal their own material, sensory, and image-making capacities. Through works made with scanners, robotic vacuums, window-cleaning robots, computer mice, printers, smartphone sensors, and thermal paper, I investigate how devices record, respond to, and interact with the environments around them. Rather than treating machines as neutral tools, my work considers them as active participants within broader material and ecological situations. The talk will outline how this approach relates to expanded ideas of drawing and photography, as well as to current questions around machine perception, nonhuman agency, and the black-boxed nature of contemporary technologies. It will also introduce the basis for a potential dialogue between artistic research and computer vision research.

Short bio:

Will Peck is a London-based artist whose work explores the materiality, agency, and image-making capacities of everyday technologies. Using devices such as flatbed scanners, robotic vacuums, window-cleaning robots, printers, and smartphone sensors, he creates works that emerge through interactions between machines, environments, and chance conditions. His practice engages with expanded ideas of drawing and photography, often focusing on how technological devices sense and register the world beyond their intended use. His research is particularly concerned with nonhuman agency, machine perception, and the material traces produced through misused or recontextualised apparatuses.