Claudia Colombo nominated for Swiss Design Award
We congratulate our Senior Designer Claudia Colombo for being nominated for the Swiss Design Award. The Federal Design Commission of the Swiss Federal Office of Culture (BAK) nominated Claudia’s research on “Latent Images” which investigates image interpretation as well as image creation of contemporary artificial intelligences.
This research addresses the formation of machine ‘knowledge’ and its manifestation as – time-, place- and culture-bound – visual artefacts, through a process of image-generation experiments with a network of machine learning models turning text into visual outputs. A process that exposes the nature of the correlation between language and images in this environment, and then investigates the new correlations introduced by further machine and human assessments. Bias is eventually recognised not only as harmful, but as a structural component of such knowledge, by observing how this technology reflects back onto humanity what humanity has fed it with.
“Latent Images” consists of two books, nine videos and three posters. The work will be shown during Art Basel as part of the Swiss Design Awards Exhibition in Hall 1.1 at Messe Basel. The research project represents Claudia Colombo’s Master’s thesis at Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst FHNW in Basel.
