The Camera, Transformed by Machine Learning
The act of taking a photo is a very personal, intimate thing. It is a mechanical representation of your perspective, adjusted and dialed in to best record what you are seeing. It is an act of labor that extends past the body in order to capture that moment in time. The camera is both tool and partner in the creation of the image, and often allows the user to extend their vision in ways that biology cannot (zoom, exposure, depth of field, etc.). With cameras becoming more autonomous, I believe that relationship between user and tool remains intact. Perhaps it has moved into more of a platonic partnership rather than an intimate romance, but the authorship remains the same. Artworks are credited to the user and their materials. The more autonomous the imaging system the more dependency and trust the user has to place in the system. As machine learning advances, we may have to credit these systems as full fledged co-authors.