Machine gaze on women: How everyday machine-vision-technologies see women in films

Machine vision systems provide new ways to study moving images. Recently, tools employing specifically designed machine vision algorithms are being used to analyze gender perspective in films. The results are effective for policymaking and creating awareness for gender imbalance in film culture. Adopting an experimental approach, this study looks at women’s images in films through commercially available machine vision systems and discusses what we can learn from machine ways of looking at films about both films and machines. The first section discusses the tectonic shift machine vision systems caused in contemporary visual culture and how this shift challenges visual culture researchers to find new ways to make sense of new visuality. The second part addresses the continuity, validity of discussions on race and gender in contemporary visual culture by introducing the concepts such as “coded gaze” and “algorithmic oppression” and it is followed by a review of how computational approaches have been employed to study gender representation in films. The last section presents a playful experiment to look at film images through commercially available machine vision systems and discusses the findings as a basis to initiate further questions interrogating the agency of women in contemporary visuality.