Built heritage has been both subject and product of a gaze that has been sustained through moments of colonial fixation on ruins and monuments, technocratic examination and representation, and fetishisation by a global tourist industry. We argue that the recent proliferation of machine learning and vision technologies create new scopic regimes for heritage: storing and retrieving existing images from vast digital archives, and further imparting their own distortions upon this gaze. We introduce the term ‘ machinic gaze’ to conceptualise the reconfiguration of heritage representation via artificial intelligence (AI) models. To explore how this gaze reframes heritage, we deploy an image-text-image pipeline that reads, interprets, and resynthesizes images of several UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Employing two concepts from media studies— heteroscopia and anamorphosis—we describe the reoriented perspective that machine vision systems introduce. We propose that the machinic gaze highlights the artifice of the human gaze and its underlying assumptions and practices that combine to form established notions of heritage.

中文翻译：

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通过机器的目光（重新）构建建筑遗产

建筑遗产既是一种凝视的主题，也是一种凝视的产物，这种凝视在殖民时期对废墟和纪念碑的迷恋、技术官僚的审查和代表以及全球旅游业的迷恋中一直持续着。我们认为，最近机器学习和视觉技术的激增为遗产创造了新的视角机制：从大量数字档案中存储和检索现有图像，并进一步将它们自己的扭曲传递给这种凝视。我们引入“机器凝视”一词来概念化通过人工智能（AI）模型重新配置遗产表示。为了探索这种目光如何重塑遗产，我们部署了一个图像-文本-图像管道来读取、解释和重新合成多个联合国教科文组织世界遗产的图像。利用媒体研究中的两个概念——异视和变形——我们描述了机器视觉系统引入的重新定向的视角。我们认为，机器凝视凸显了人类凝视的技巧及其潜在的假设和实践，这些假设和实践结合起来形成了既定的遗产概念。