Pattern Recognition

Leanne Romak
Nov 6 · 2 min read

“Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation. A photograph is a result of the photographer’s decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen. If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless. ~John Berger

If photographs bear witness to human experience, what does it mean to the artist in an age where digital photography has become ubiquitous, smartphones record and distribute endless images, and security cameras and satellites map the globe? How does the artist extract meaning from the noise?

Pattern recognition is the automated recognition of patterns and regularities in data. Pattern recognition is closely related to artificial intelligence and machine learning. ~Wikipedia

Pattern recognition in humans is key to survival and deeply rooted in semantic memory; general knowledge of the world intertwined in experience and dependent on culture.

Marshall McLuhan said that the work of the artist is to find patterns. “Pattern recognition in the midst of a huge, overwhelming, destructive force is the way out of the maelstrom. By studying the patterns of the effects of this huge vortex of energy in which we are involved, it may be possible to program a strategy of evasion and survival.”

More than a strategy of individual evasion and survival, the task of pattern recognition in art has the potential to give us back the collective humanity that the digital overwhelm threatens to erase.

Vija Celmins | Ocean 1975 | Tate |© Vija Celmins

Artist Vija Celmins created drawings from photos of the ocean’s surface at her home on Venice Beach. Her series of graphite drawings were about the process of drawing rather than faithfully copying a photograph. There is no frame of reference, no horizon, no human form, but one can feel the heartbeat of the maker in the act of viewing and documenting this spare and honest view.

I’ve always liked the scientific image because it’s sort of anonymous and often the artist for the image has been a machine. I like the idea that I can relive that image and put it in a kind of human context. ~Vija Celmins

Machines and algorithms present images to us without context. There is an urgent necessity for the artist to choose, reflect, interpret and expose. If creating art becomes an exercise in pattern recognition; meaning comes from the act of distilling this external bombardment as an offering for a shared narrative of communal imagination.

Certified member of the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada, CGD™

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