Action Items is a reverse-engineered retelling of Miloš Forman’s 1975 film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest through the film’s hand gestures. Every clip containing hands was extracted from the film and discretely shown to Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, who described the action, the utilitarian function of the gesture, and the emotion or objective of the person performing it. The story is then reconstructed using these descriptions, and the associated clips, in a way that blends the aesthetics of a visual data AI training set with the style of a children’s picture book.
This project mimics the processes used to develop and test machine vision software programs. Still and moving images collected at random from internet and social media form the basis for highly commodified training datasets. They, or cropped pieces of them, get stripped from context and tagged with descriptive words and classified accordingly.
Action Items is an experiment to see what is lost, and what is added in, through this process of discretization. It asks, what does it mean to watch a film via a machine-like style of vision? Where does meaning get made, and how is erased, altered, or remade through this process?
Hands perpetuate plot, externalize emotion, and intimate power dynamics. They also, just as the dialog of a film, convey subtext—“that [which] lies behind and beneath … it is the manifest, the inwardly felt expression of a human being in a part, which flows uninterruptedly beneath the words of a text, giving them life and a basis for existing” (Konstantin Stanislovsky in Building Character).
Action Items juxtaposes subtext with database logic.
Exhibited in the Tisch School of the Arts Lobby as part of the show The Lounge, September 2016.