Andrew Kupresanin’s Nadia project claims that “The camera that thinks, so you don’t have to.”  Instead of showing an image on its viewfinder, the camera leverages ACQUINE, the “Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine,” in order to display an aesthetic rating

As I’ve said previously, developments like this makes think of the Robin Williams character in Dead Poets Society excoriating a textbook that rated poetry along two axes:

Excrement! That’s what I think of Mr. J. Evans Pritchard! We’re not laying pipe! We’re talking about poetry. How can you describe poetry like American Bandstand? “I like Byron, I give him a 42 but I can’t dance to it!”

Or, as The Online Photographer put it, “If You Think You Need This, Kill Yourself.”

I start wondering whether the art project here is a bit more “meta” than it appears: The point is to make photographers flip out–a sea of (largely) angry old white guys as the medium, unknowingly engaged in mass performance art. If so, touché! [Via Tobias Hoellrich]

Previously: “A computational model of aesthetics”