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Friday, April 23, 2021

Mark McKnight at Park View/Paul Soto



The confusion of the machines reading this as "violent content" is almost objective evidence of McKnight's latent own - the algorithm seeing violence, "humanitarian crisis," or corpses in the body of a tree. I mean it is a sensitive photo. Instagram's policies are notoriously opaque, but assuming this was an automated process, the robots choosing violence don't understand corpses or flesh or violence. (Picking a boat out of a lineup of 9 images fools most robots.) Rather they amass a generalized cloud of what violent content looks like. It's in this etherous affect of violence, of horror - removed from a strict concept of corpse - that both you and the algorithm respond to a tree. No so different after all, husks of the dead, apophenic machines. There's more content to that Bernini-like grasping of flesh than the new church would allow.