Many Eyes of Archillect

An experimental social media collaboration

The way Archillect works is quite a contrast to what she does. If you think about it Archillect is a visual curation automaton without any kind of visual* judgement. The way selections are made are almost completely based on social media interactions, therefore, Archillect has no ability to know* what is in the image or how beautiful or the attractive the image looks*. What matters to her is the potential reach (aka “likability”) of the content, as she depends on her followers’ interactions, or judgement.

In other words Archillect is technically a blind curator of visually pleasing content.

In a few casual talks I’ve been asked if Archillect has eyes. I made some brainstorming on the topic and I now believe she does, indeed. Her eyes are the eyes of her followers, as those eyes are the ones that see, and their owners are the ones who judge.

From this point of view, Archillect has many eyes.

I wanted to ignite a social media collaboration on this topic and tweeted this without expecting too many responses:

In less than 24 hours, more than 500 submissions were made. Out of these more-than-500 responses, close to 500 of them are healthy submissions. This is fascinating and to me, unexpected. I wasn’t expecting people to actually take pictures of their eyes! Not this many!

Output is a charming gif. I can proudly say “we” made it together.

Sad news is that, I had to manually go over all of those images to center their irises. I am sure there are more clever ways of doing this however I wanted to be fast and sometimes brute force is the fastest. Would like to learn more about programmatically batch processing images now, though.

Also this is the first of a series of collaborations with followers. Everyone seems to enjoy it. Then why not do more?

Before I end this post I would like to leave you with this serious final note.