rrrreflect. Journal of Integrated Design Research has published a special issue with our conference proceedings of the 2024 edition of Hidden Layers. In addition, recordings of the talks have been published.
“What’s hidden in the hidden layers? The contents can be easy to find […] but the hidden layers have yet to give up all their secrets.”
In 1989, Byte, “the small systems journal,” not only asked a question we are still asking today, but also provided today’s answers to the challenges of deep learning – from backpropagation to feature visualization and synthetic training data. Even the applications remain the same: nonlinear classification and self-driving cars.
Once again, this reveals the surprising continuity of methods, applications, and rhetoric in the field of machine learning, that claims perpetual novelty, even though its roots stretch all the way back to cybernetics and its origins in control engineering. But the secrets of the hidden layers, it has become clear, are not only what is revealed by looking at their weights or their activation in response to particular inputs.
This collection of texts explores the key themes and discussions of the second edition of the Hidden Layers conference, held at Köln International School of Design from June 12 to 15, 2024. Offering various perspectives on ‘hidden layers’, the conference was organized in two thematic tracks: “AI, Code & Material” and “AI, Society & (Visual) Culture.”
Authors: Silvio Lorusso, Roland Meyer, Maria-Teresa De Rosa Palmini, Laura Juliane Wagner, Anton Koch, Cláudia Sevivas, Sylvia Rijmer, Vito Evola, and Pamela C. Scorzin.
Edited by Matthias Grund and Lasse Scherffig.