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Last year artist and designer Richard Vijgen made an intriguing multimedia installation. Vijgen was commissioned by the VPRO and Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam to work with the broadcasts of VPRO Tegenlicht. Artificial intelligence (AI) is used to search and analyze all episodes of the program, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. AI has, if properly trained, a superhuman ability to recognize patterns in moving images. In Vijgen's installation, an AI has been trained to analyze the Backlight transmissions and point out what is recognizable from them. Visitors can influence the outcomes by playing with the way the 'artificial eye' views the program archive.

Vijgen’s installation is now coming to Leeuwarden. The Tegenlicht broadcasts have been replaced by more than 600 films from the collection of the Frisian Film & Audio Archive (FFAA) covering the period from 1920-1985. How do hundreds of hours of historical images behave in Vijgen's installation and what does the AI show us?

The installation is an exploration of what an 'Archive of the Future' could look like. The confluence of an exponential increase in data collection and our improved ability to process that data has recently led to the development of machine learning algorithms. These will help determine future interaction between society and technology. It is therefore interesting to see what happens when we use an AI that has learned to recognize visual patterns to analyze film images. Because how does a computer actually see when it looks at something?

In all his work, Richard Vijgen explores how data visualization and interactivity can enable people to imagine, experience and embody the abstract and often opaque digital techniques he talks about.

The installation will open in Tresoar on November 10 at 2pm and is freely accessible to the public every day. Tresoar is open until 10pm Thursday through Saturday and until 5pm on Sunday.