white clouds in the blue sky is a three-channel video installation by artist-anthropologists Kate Hennessy and Trudi Lynn Smith and artist and artificial intelligence scholar Steve DiPaola. The premiere of the first iteration of this work was in February, 2022 at the Surrey UrbanScreen, as a part of the program Body as Border, curated by Gabriela Aceves-Sepulveda, Freya Zinovieff, and prOphecy Sun. Edited by J Tseng; AI systems support by Amineh Ahmadinejad.

The work juxtaposes a performative engagement with the materiality of gallery refuse with the poetics and politics of machine vision. Hennessy and Smith methodically construct a sculptural heap of utilitarian objects like stacks of chairs and scrap materials that have been gathered after an exhibition and are destined for the landfill. As they create and then deconstruct the pile of mundane and broken objects, these assemblages are interpreted by DenseCap machine vision and description system, which is confounded in its attempts to accurately identify and interpret assemblages of objects created. The system uses a neural network language model to generate language sequences (Johnson et. al. 2017), yet the abstract shapes created as the artists arrange waste materials are misinterpreted by the system (see Martineau, 2019), and its articulations become textual waste of a new order. A second channel shows a poetic text that is edited by the artists from sentences generated by the system.  A third channel displays a montage of AI-generated images based on  the poetic text, a further attempt by the machine to make sense of what it sees. The soundtrack is yet another AI-generated response to the performance-initiated texts. 

The title of the work, white clouds in the blue sky is frequently repeated throughout the work and is audible in the phrasing of the soundtrack. It is evocative in its misinterpretation of the scene; its association of landfill refuse with an idealized image of nature; and its reference to the metaphor and materiality of the cloud, where data processing  and rendering of the generated images is taking place. This video work highlights tensions between individual human structures of memory and imagination, contemporary computational image recognition systems, and the capacity of generative systems to create new representations of the world. As the artists sort through and re-arrange both material refuse and digital waste, they draw parallels between the planetary proliferation of material waste, the proliferation of digital imagery being mobilized in artificial intelligence data training sets, and the energy resources required and wasted to power these interactions. By drawing attention to current limitations of machine vision in recognizing and describing objects (and unique assemblages of objects), the work points to significant possibilities and difficulties as humans and machines increasingly mutually constitute, reinforce and re-write classifications and meanings of things. How will machines read images and artworks in the future, and what stories will be told about them? What stories will humans be able to tell and imagine in the future, in relation to new intelligent storytelling machines? What kind of planet will we inhabit? Will the skies be blue? Will the clouds be white?