Robotic vision and artificial intelligence don’t just record or represent the world around us. They actively shape how we see, understand, and imagine it.

Designed to serve human needs, these technologies and the images and data they produce, also have a way of looping back to influence human perception. This feedback process, also known as “the loop”, is especially significant for artists, scientists, and image-makers working with remotely captured data, where seeing is mediated by machines rather than being a direct experience.

Loops of Perception is a project Eldridge led at the University of Southampton and the National Oceanography Centre between June 2025 and February 2026, involving a series of interdisciplinary collaborative workshops. Supported by the University of Southampton’s Web Science Institute Pilot Project Fund, the workshops saw participants build and operate low-fi underwater sensing devices to produce data of the River Itchen in Winchester. In fast-paced, hands-on, co-creative activities participants used this data to draw new insights – tacit, practical and sometimes absurd – from the cache of material they collected. The objects, images, and artworks created come from a series of collaborations where artists, designers, scientists, and technologists explored the loop in action.

The results of collaborative efforts were shown in an exhibition February – April 2026 alongside individual responses to the project by some of its participants. The non-human perception of the submersible augments human experience of the river by producing information, whilst rendering the local unfamiliar in an extra-perceptual palette of violet and magenta. As a project, it made-strange our own disciplinary boundaries and opened up fresh, accessible ways of thinking about how machines see the world – and how that vision might shape our own.

Contributors:
Alice Casey
Qingszhou Cai
Jess Curtis
Ian Dawson
Jocelyn Eddy
Luci Eldridge
Dave Gibbons
Amy Godliman
Sadie Jones
Daniela Mihai
Vidula Natarajan
Nana-Shireen Nduka
Chris O’Connor
Meg Rahaim
Yadira Sanchez
Martina Stiasny
Esther Sumner
Blair Thornton
Nina Trivedi
Vanissa Wanick