self-checkout

Whilst working on the exhibition “Self checkout”, Konopiński draws on photographs from datasets made available on the Roboflow Universe platform – hundreds of thousands of images of objects, created solely to train “object detection” algorithms, which are subsequently used, amongst other things, in self-service checkouts and surveillance systems. 

The artist appropriates images originally intended for machines, then opens them up to human interpretation and reintroduces them into the cultural sphere – thereby revealing the narrative potential of images created for a purely pragmatic purpose. What was intended for classification becomes an object of contemplation – both for the artist and for the spectator. The exhibition’s soundscape is formed by a separate dataset. It consists of selected customer reviews of a supermarket – a collection of impressions gathered not by a machine, but by people themselves. 

The exhibition is curated by Antonina Marat.