Ethology of Latent Spaces
It addresses the problem of hidden biases in VLMs for digital art history, calling for critical reassessment in cultural interpretation.
This study challenges the neutrality of latent spaces in vision language models by analyzing their algorithmic behaviors on a corpus of 301 artworks, revealing substantial divergences in political and cultural categorization, such as SigLIP classifying 59.4% as politically engaged versus only 4% for OpenCLIP.
This study challenges the presumed neutrality of latent spaces in vision language models (VLMs) by adopting an ethological perspective on their algorithmic behaviors. Rather than constituting spaces of homogeneous indeterminacy, latent spaces exhibit model-specific algorithmic sensitivities, understood as differential regimes of perceptual salience shaped by training data and architectural choices. Through a comparative analysis of three models (OpenAI CLIP, OpenCLIP LAION, SigLIP) applied to a corpus of 301 artworks (15th to 20th), we reveal substantial divergences in the attribution of political and cultural categories. Using bipolar semantic axes derived from vector analogies (Mikolov et al., 2013), we show that SigLIP classifies 59.4% of the artworks as politically engaged, compared to only 4% for OpenCLIP. African masks receive the highest political scores in SigLIP while remaining apolitical in OpenAI CLIP. On an aesthetic colonial axis, inter-model discrepancies reach 72.6 percentage points. We introduce three operational concepts: computational latent politicization, describing the emergence of political categories without intentional encoding; emergent bias, irreducible to statistical or normative bias and detectable only through contrastive analysis; and three algorithmic scopic regimes: entropic (LAION), institutional (OpenAI), and semiotic (SigLIP), which structure distinct modes of visibility. Drawing on Foucault's notion of the archive, Jameson's ideologeme, and Simondon's theory of individuation, we argue that training datasets function as quasi-archives whose discursive formations crystallize within latent space. This work contributes to a critical reassessment of the conditions under which VLMs are applied to digital art history and calls for methodologies that integrate learning architectures into any delegation of cultural interpretation to algorithmic agents.