In this talk, Elisa Giardina Papa will outline the theoretical and archival research which informs two of her experimental video installations, Cleaning Emotional Data and “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale. Presenting images she collected while working as a “data cleaner” for various AI systems, she will address the ways in which machines are disciplined and trained to see. Tracing, bounding-boxing, and labeling are key operations used to teach machines to separate Data from data, signal from noise, and orderly things from disorderly ones. They are also, Giardina Papa argues, the onto-epistemological operations of modern imperial and colonial conquest. To address AI’s normative impulse to divide and classify, create hierarchies and produce difference, we need to understand machine vision not only as a “new” tool of extractive capitalism but also, more importantly, as one of the many tools of a recursive hegemonic ordering of the world. Ultimately, this talk will be an invitation to reflect on modes of seeing otherwise which remain radically unruly, irreducible, and incomputable.