Zabludowicz Takeover

Working alongside fellow FAULT LINES artist Helen Knowles, we took over the Instagram account of the Zabludowicz Collection for five days.

Helen’s focus for this was around various key themes (for example, “the ethics of technology”, “the internet”). For the takeover, we built an algorithmic system that used both these key themes, plus data and themes inferred from a broader written statement from Helen, and search the internet for what it deemed to be interesting or relevant images.

The algorithm makes a few passes at inferring meaning, and then selects many hundreds of images, from which a random number are selected based on relevancy, and interest points like faces being present, or text, etc. It then decides upon a posting time (typically during the day, but some at odd hours) and posts the image on our behalf, with no human curation, editing or selection.

These images were posted continuously for five days, to 64,000+ followers on the site.