Laws of Ordered Form at BIAS
Laws of Ordered Form was created by manually reclassifying thousands of photographs of images found in Victorian and Edwardian-era encyclopaedias, mimicking the process of building a training dataset for machine learning projects.
In many ways, a training dataset can be seen as a contemporary encyclopedia: both try to describe everything in the world and make decisions about what is important enough to record, and these decisions inevitably reflect the cultural and social attitudes of the time, and the individual biases of the author.
The exhibit also draws attention to the inherent ridiculousness of trying to capture and flatten the world into categories, through the creation of arbitrary classifications that are applied to the dataset photographs.
For more on BIAS, see dublin.sciencegallery.com/bias.