Five Years of Captured Captchas | Silvio Lorusso and Sebastian Schmieg, 2017
▻http://five.yearsofcaptured.ca/ptchas
Five Years of Captured Captchas is a series of five leporello books that span a total length of 90 meters, chronicling every single captcha that we have solved over the course of five years.
At the end of 2011, while discussing the labor involved in such routinely performed tests, we decided to take a screenshot of all the captchas that we would pass. Doing so, we established a diary of our almost daily micro-labor and a stable archive of these ubiqitous techno-visual artifacts.
Throughout the collection, it is possible to retrace the evolution of captchas: initially a technique to merely prevent spam, then a system employed by Google for the ‘philanthropic’ purpose of digitalizing knowledge, later (indirectly) used as a method to improve Street View, and finally a means of teaching image recognition to AI software.
Acknowledging that most of our work was done for Google, Five Years of Captured Captchas is also a quinquennial report that celebrates a fruitful collaboration with the company.