Installation by David Bowen features a colony of houseflies monitored with artificial intelligence controlling their wellbeing:
The installation uses the TensorFlow machine learning image recognition library to classify images of live houseflies. As the flies fly and land in front of a camera their image is captured. The captured image is classified by the image recognition software and what the software guesses it is looking at is ranked 1 through 5 and output. Each ranking is assigned a percentage based on how likely the software thinks that this is what it is looking at.
If “fly” is ranked number 1 on the list, a pump delivers water and nutrients to the colony based on the percentage of the ranking. If “fly” is not ranked number 1 the pump does not deliver water and nutrients to the colony. The system is setup to run indefinitely with an indeterminate outcome.
