Zuka KipianiDecoding Perception

Building upon the legacy of Jon Rafman’s The Nine Eyes of Google Street View, Kipiani curated hundreds of Google Street view images then deployed a custom AI model to interpret the rich, often irrational complexity of human emotion and sentiment captured over the years by Google’s famous car mounted cameras.

The collected photos are no longer just for mapping our cities or visualizing the world. Instead, Kipiani tasked an AI model with the seemingly impossible: using algorithmic precision rather than intuitive cognition to perceive intangibles central to the human experience.

There is a richness even in the model’s “failure”—such as finding love in a pattern of urban symmetry or recognizing camaraderie in the alignment of trees—revealing both the limitations and the poetic potential of artificial intelligence. These divergences are the heart of Kipiani’s exploration, showcasing how AI interprets the world in both alien and occasionally insightful ways, reflecting a non-human "gaze" upon human emotion and experience. In many ways, the machine’s misunderstandings can be seen as a parallel to the ambiguity of human emotions—how even we, as emotional beings, often struggle to articulate or understand our feelings fully.

In a world increasingly mediated by technology, Kipiani invites us as humans to reflect on what it means to feel, perceive, and understand. Yet it also serves as a warning. AI may never truly understand us, but it is certainly watching, processing, and evolving.