Shinseungback Kimyonghun

»Animal Classifier« by artist duo Shinseungback Kimyonghun consists of artificial intelligence trained to divide animals into 14 different classifications. The taxonomy used, which includes categories such as »belonging to the emperor,« »embalmed,« or »innumerable,« derives from the essay »The Analytical Language of John Wilkins« by Jorge Luis Borges in which he writes, “it is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what thing the universe is.”

The installation parodies the scientific method of classification by reproducing the classical setup of bell jars and engraved metal plates displaying a variety of specimens in which the scientist has been replaced by image recognition software. It also acts as an analysis of current AI systems that are basically classifiers. As these systems learn and work based on the classifications provided by humans, they are inevitably imperfect. In exactly the same way as Borges introduces the classification as an example of faulty human schemes, Shinseungback Kimyonghun foreground in their work the imperfections and weak points in AI classification systems.