The archive activists Michael Murtaugh, Nicolas Malevé and Ellef Prestsæter together present the installation The Scandinavian Institute of Computational Vandalism. During the opening, which will be held on Wednesday, January 27, 2016 at 18:00 at Constant, you will have the opportunity to discover the treasures hidden behind its virtual scenes.

The project is inspired by the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism
(SICV) founded by Asger Jorn shortly after leaving the Situationist International in
1961. The SICV was an art and research association experimenting with the practice
of collage, the forces of photography, image archives, and political imaginaries.
Today Computational Vandalism challenges the assumptions at the basis of computer vision, the discipline that programmatically ties together the visual and the
mnemonic.

In every operation of computer vision, there is this expectation that the gap between human perception and computer perception will be filled. But what if it isn’t? What if it reveals that there is a zone of intersection between human perception and computer vision, and that the contours of this zone are problematic, fluctuating? The process of computer vision is often narrated like a crime investigation where a story has to be reconstructed from various traces. Computational vandalism is what introduces us to a world with a proliferation of powerfully meaningless little clues that do not point towards any murderer. Nobody is punished in the world of computational vandalists, but its visual structure is denser. Computational vandalism is Agatha Christie smoking Asger Jorn’s cigar.