https://what-we-crop.vercel.app/
What We Crop is an interactive web experiment developed within the Art + Media Studio: Latent Museum course and its accompanying research paper exploring indirect ways of thinking about museums, generative AI, and latent space.
Using one of the most famous Finnish paintings, Boys Playing on the Shore, the project explores how attention is distributed inside an artwork. Visitors are invited to crop the area they consider the most important, revealing which parts of the painting attract attention and which remain overlooked or “latent”. Participants are also invited to briefly explain why they selected a particular area.
The project contributes to the paper’s broader question on how latencies work in generative space. By collecting and comparing these cropped selections, What We Crop examines how latent structures emerge through human perception, similarly to how generative AI organizes probabilities within latent space. The work approaches the painting not as a fixed image, but as a space where attention, meaning, and latency are unevenly distributed.