You Only Look Once by Lisa Barnard at C/O Berlin

Curated by Katharina Täschner, In You Only Look Once delves into the fraught intersections of technology, ecology, and perception.

Overview

In her first major project in four years, British artist Lisa Barnard considers perception in relation to both human and machine experience. She addresses the complexity of technological progress and the ecological resources on which its promises depend. 

Barnard’s research focuses on California, unfolding a multilayered, fragmented and nonlinear story that encompasses photographs, an immersive video installation, archival interventions, alternative printing strategies and AI-generated image analyses that weave together in the creation of a dense visual entanglement.

The project’s starting point is the Salton Sea in Southern California. This area previously served as a site for military testing during World War II, but has now become the site of economic desire and technological solutionism in the form of lithium extraction. Barnard’s work depicts the clear signs of ecological depletion of this once flourishing environment, while addressing the military gaze that is tied to the site and part of its complex history.

Barnard continues to explore how technologies that rely on vision and soundwaves impact interactions between humans and machines. Using echolocation in bats, Barnard focuses on current modes of object detection that are now ubiquitous in autonomous vehicles. Much like humans, these systems rely on a wide range of sensors and imagery in order to perceive and navigate the world. Although artificial intelligence learning programs such as You Only Look Once enable real-time object detection, machines will never have genuine or conscious experience. 

In You Only Look Once, Barnard makes us aware of the parallels and differences between human, animal, and machine consciousness, and of the moments when recognizing the world devolves into an active way of shaping it. Reflecting on the extent to which today’s global multicrises are interconnected, Barnard comments on the entanglements created by machine “autonomy”. So, at a time when the climate is in crisis, we must ask how technologies can be developed that are not only efficient but also sensitive to the world they are intended to capture. 

About The Artist

Lisa Barnard (b. 1967, United Kingdom) is a British artist and lecturer whose photography focuses on real events. In her projects, she combines classical documentary methods such as photography, audio, video, and text with contemporary visual strategies and digital technologies. She brings together her interest in aesthetics and current debates on the materiality of photography with political questions surrounding new ecological efforts, technological developments, science, and the industrial military complex. Barnard is an associate professor and head of the online masters in documentary photography at University of South Wales. She regularly exhibits her work and has published three monographs: Chateau Despair (2012, GOST, supported by Arts Council England), Hyenas of the Battlefield: Machines in the Garden (2014, GOST, supported by Albert Renger-Patzsch prize), and The Canary and the Hammer (2019, MACK, supported by Getty Images Prestige Grant).