With biosurveillance, there are tremendous stakes when something or someone is undetectable as a result of being smaller than a pixel. Since my numerous treatments and body-altering/life-saving surgery, my imaging has been 'clean' thus far. But even an unremarkable report will contain statements such as, "Stable low-attenuation lesions too small to characterize." While even the most benign results might read as boring, there are suspicious territories that require vigilance and scrutiny. It’s not what’s in the images that keeps me up at night, it’s what’s below the sensors’ threshold of resolution.
In enhance-redact, these images’ resolution is caught in an unstable loop of reduction and enhancement that cycles between a process of making them smaller (to comport within the PD290 slow-scan television format, in which images are transmitted as sound over radio) and a process of AI upscaling and interpretation that opens up and misreads the cracks between pixels. These enhanced images have no diagnostic value, instead offering a site of induced apophenia: a place of figments and monsters.
The first time I ran it on a CT scan of my abdomen, it returned the following list of detected objects: [ "face", "face", "face", "face", "face", "face", "face", "face", "face", "face", "face", "face", "face", "face", "face", "face", "face", "face", "face", "face", "face", "bee", "beetle", "wire", "machine" ]. The computer can’t tell me if my cancer is going to return. But maybe the absurdity of using these technologies to look deeply into these images can temper my scanxiety.
The project manifests as a radio transmission that contains a mix of signals.
The radio signal is decoded back into images and text that are fed back through the loop. A live stream of this signal can be found at the top of this page.
This piece has been written on crip time. It runs slowly and locally on low-power computers. It is built with and created as open source software (no codes vibed), open models, and, for the most part, open hardware.
This project is the first of a series that draws upon my prior work on militarized surveillance and its oversight to consider and process my position as the subject of cancer surveillance. The series will continue until my surveillance comes to an end as scheduled in 2030, or they find something before then that requires a return to treatment.
Apophenia: the tendency to perceive meaningful patterns or connections in random or unrelated data.
Enhancement: Upscaling/enhancement is a fantasy often enacted in film and TV technothrillers in which a technologically savvy character is able to make a low resolution image into a high resolution image, bringing a blurry license plate into focus, or make a face in a satellite image suddenly recognizable. In reality, image enhancement doesn’t work with superhuman vision or predictive ability; it fills in with probabilistic guesses based on the image sets the model was trained on. In this case, the images are fully synthetic images that have no indexical relationship to our lived world.
Radio Teletype (RTTY): Invented in the 1920s, and based on mid-19th century telegraphy, RTTY uses frequency key shifting (FSK) to encode and decode text into narrow-band radio transmissions; due to the narrow bandwidth, these transmissions take several minutes to transmit a single image frame. Teletypewriters (TTY) used by those with hearing disabilities have historically used an almost identical format. Both are encoded at 45.5 baud (changes per second) using the Baudet character set (all capital letters with limited punctuation).
Redaction: Redaction is the process of obscuring or permanently removing sensitive information from a record. In this piece redaction occurs both in both the acts of reduction (making these medical images smaller) and enhancement (making them larger by adding hallucinated pixels).
Reduction: In this context, the process of lowering the resolution of an image. Information is removed as pixels collapse into each other. This process also adds traces of what media scholar Jonathan Sterne calls mediality: “the complex, cross-referential web of practices, references, and material conditions that constitute media.”
Scanxiety: Scanxiety is the increased level of anxiousness patients feel before, during and after a scan to diagnose cancer, monitor the progress of treatment or determine whether the cancer has recurred.
Slow-Scan Television (SSTV): Invented in the 1950s, slow-scan television encodes still images using narrow-band radio frequencies designed for voice frequencies. It was used by NASA in the 1960s to beam images of the moon back to Earth and is still used by weather satellites.
Unremarkable: An unremarkable test result means that nothing is out of the ordinary.
dedicated to Sanda Jo Spiegel (1947-2024)
enhance-redact is a project of Leonardo CripTech AI Lab (2025).
this piece is included as part of the virtual exhibition Slow AI