Leaking Subjects and Bounding Boxes addresses the ways in which machines are disciplined and
trained to see. It is a visual account that documents the methods currently used to teach AI to
capture classify and order the world but instead considers everything in our lives
embodiments and desires that defies these normative modes of categorization. That is it
pauses to reflect upon that which continually flickers in and out of any possible
taxonomization and exists only at the very edge of definition. This book is one outcome Elisa
Giardina Papa's ongoing visual and theoretical research into machinic vision. It presents
images which the artist began collecting in the winter of 2019 while working as a human trainer
for various AI vision systems. Among the thousands of training images she processed for her
tasks as a data-cleaner she collected those which seemed to resist AI's orderly impulse.
Segmenting tracing bounding-boxing and labeling are key operations used to teach machines to
separate data from data signal from noise and orderly things from disorderly ones. This
collection of images is an invitation to reflect on what it means to practice a disorder of
seeing and being which radically resists the normative impulse to divide and classify to
create hierarchies and produce difference. In other words this book is an invitation to
consider the ways in which all things that are opaque and promiscuous heretical and unfaithful
will perpetually upset orderly idealized transparent and supposedly universal categories.
