Jason Salavon: Little Infinity (v.MFAH): Nov 2, 2020 – ongoing

When the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston's new Nancy and Rich Kinder Building opened in November, it unveiled a number of new artist commissions, including Jason Salavon's Little Infinity (v. MFAH), which wraps the outside of the new dedicated photography gallery. For this work, Salavon reproduced the most important image dataset of our time, ImageNet, as a monumental wallpaper that melds with the architecture of the encyclopedic photography galleries. Utterly contemporary, the ImageNet is a foundational image collection used in training neural networks for use in myriad applications requiring image recognition and classification (self-driving vehicles, medical image analysis, surveillance, etc). In this piece, 1.2 million images comprising 1000 categories from the training set are displayed, cascading down the walls. Arranged by category and sorted by brightness, this presentation lays bare the entirety of this dataset, in all of its benefits and flaws.