King's College London

Cinema and Machine Vision is an in-depth study into the technologies, practices, and consequences of learning to see through machines, most recently computers. At its heart, the book is an invitation for film and media scholars to critically engage with AI at a technical level, a prompt for computer scientists and machine learning engineers working with images to critically reflect on where their assumptions about vision come from, and a call to both to recognise the fruitful problems of working together.

Dr. Daniel Chávez Heras, Lecturer in Digital Culture and Creative Computing

Cinema and machine vision rescaled the world, from cell to pixel, detail to data. Daniel Chavez Heras shows us the parallel and diverging ways they have become worldmaking. A wonderful and necessary book that starts the story of AI where it should be started: in much earlier technical imaging practices of cinema.

Professor Jussi Parikka, Aarhus University, author of Operational Images

This ambitious and imaginative book explores how we can teach machines to watch films without taking away from our human pleasure of doing so. Equally well versed in the technical discourse of computer vision and the cultural theory of visuality, Daniel Chávez Heras issues an invitation to us all to envisage new ways of seeing and making with AI.

Professor Joanna Zylinska, Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice, Author of The Perception Machine