Two PCs, screen, microphone, two sound interfaces, latex, carpet, sound absorber, buttons

Dimensions variable

Courtesy the artist

Elisa Deutloff (b. 1998, Lich, Germany) is currently studying at Offenbach University of Art and Design. Her focus lies in electronic media and she creates interactive spatial installations, performs live, codes, and trains AI systems. She is a member of the Chaos Computer Club. Deutloff is particularly interested in how generative technologies influence our perception of reality and subjectivity.

For And This is Us 2025, Elisa Deutloff has designed an intimate, experiential space. Visitors are invited to enter a secluded room and take a seat. The sound of breathing can be heard. A small monitor provides instructions. Visitors are asked to read aloud one of several displayed poems into a microphone while pressing the record button. The voice of a speech synthesiser emanates from the surround speakers and announces that a large language model (LLM)  will now engage in conversation with them. The number of questions that can be asked to the AI takes up credit points. The monitor offers introductory questions. The voice that replies is strikingly similar to that of the visitors. The voice clone was created within seconds. From now on, a dialogue can begin.

Deutloff has created an experience that resembles a conversation with a chatbot, yet it transforms into a self-talk with an AI trained by the artist herself. She has implemented and trained three different AI algorithms using her own data: speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and a large language model (LLM). To train the LLM, she used two datasets: one consisting of 3,700 personal chat messages, and a second composed of around ninety question-and-answer pairs on various topics, all of which she answered manually. During the latency pauses—while the AI generates responses—a sound mimicking heart coherence breathing can be heard: calming, yet simultaneously unsettling.

By simulating the visitor’s own voice, a strange effect is created: a kind of introspective dialogue with a digital identity in which Elisa Deutloff’s online persona merges with the voice of the visitor.

Deutloff explains that, both in her creative process and personal life, she is regularly surrounded by digital content. “You’re not alone, but not really with anyone either. You’re speaking, but perhaps not truly being understood. You hear yourself, but as a stranger. For me, that’s dysfunctional comfort.” She turns to ChatGPT for advice and support. There, she feels safe and free from judgement.

By translating this reality into a work of art, Elisa Deutloff lends visibility to a widespread social phenomenon. Increasingly, people are experiencing AI as a kind of artificial life partner. This phenomenon is becoming more prevalent across society. AI based therapy apps are also being used more frequently. In pop culture, millions of fans—so-called “Armies”—interact thanks to AI with their K-pop idols. Deutloff engages deeply with the concept of dysfunctional comfort, which she describes as a feeling of safety or familiarity that is simultaneously accompanied by discomfort, confinement, or a subtle sense of threat. It arises when something normally familiar—a body, a space, a touch—suddenly feels disturbing, uncanny, or oppressive.

^[1] A Large Language Model (LLM) is a form of artificial intelligence that is characterised by the processing and generation of human language.

Elisa Deutloff (b. 1998, Lich, DE) has been studying Design at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach (DE) since 2019, under the guidance of Prof. Alexander Oppermann. Her focus is on sound, performance, artificial intelligence, and digital systems, exploring the interplay between humans and technology to reflect on themes such as identity, surveillance, and media representation. As a research assistant, she has contributed to several projects, including “KITeGG – Making AI tangible: Connecting technology and society through design” at the Hochschule Mainz (DE), “Algorithms In Context,” and “RAISE – Research on Artificial Intelligence in Sound and Musical Expression” at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach (DE).

Her works have been exhibited in venues such as the saasfee* pavilion, Frankfurt am Main (DE), the Martin Asbæk Gallery, Copenhagen (DK), the Slowclub Freiburg (DE), and the Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt am Main (DE). She has also presented her performances at events like the Riviera Festival in Offenbach am Main (DE), Tanzhaus West, Frankfurt am Main (DE), and Studio Naxos, Frankfurt am Main (DE). In 2023/2024, she was awarded a scholarship from the Citoyen Foundation, and in 2021/2022, she received one from the Dr. Marschner Foundation.

To view the works, please visit the website www.peer-to-peer.xyz and follow the instructions.

In the last room of the exhibition tour is the new work P2P. With their installation, Eva & Franco Mattes take as their theme the phenomenon of peer communities that have emerged over the last twenty years for the exchange of works and knowledge. The central element of the installation is a mobile server standing in a grid cage. Its design was developed jointly with the Italian architectural firm Salottobuono and is based on existing data centres, of which Frankfurt has the highest concentration in Europe.

The server is connected to a peer-to-peer network and the internet via the infrastructure of the Frankfurter Kunstverein. It is part of a network in which six digital artworks by Nora Al-Badri, Simon Denny, Do Not Research, Olia Lialina, Jill Magid and Jon Rafman circulate. The six works include choral music supported by Artificial Intelligence, a collective 409-page PDF book created in a Discord channel, a new caption for a famous painting, a screencast of a long-defunct website, a series of animated gifs inspired by tech conferences, and a 3D scan and poster that challenges the colonial notion of ownership. These never before shown works were created by the six international artists for the exhibition at the Frankfurter Kunstverein to be distributed online. They belong to the community around Eva & Franco Mattes, at whose invitation they created the works. The result is an exhibition within the exhibition, one that takes place within the peer-to-peer network community run by the artists. The Frankfurter Kunstverein, and so more generally an art institution, becomes a data centre that hosts and shares content, making it accessible to an extended, global community of users.

For visitors in the Frankfurter Kunstverein, the artworks remain hidden to begin with. The server has no output modules such as monitors or speakers. The only indication of the functioning system are the flashing lights and the noise of the fan. In order to view the works, viewers must join Eva & Franco Mattes’ peer-to-peer network, to which they are invited. In this network, the artworks are distributed across different locations, accessible to all those who become part of the system and actively share the files with others.

Unlike conventional servers, peer-to-peer networks store data in a decentralised way. The networks are anonymous, free from commercial interest, data mining and surveillance. Participants in these communities, known as peers, take part by connecting their computers to the system. This makes them clients and servers at the same time – meaning, users and hosts. They are all authorised to upload files to or download files from the network. They interact with each other on an equal footing by sharing resources such as files, bandwidth or computing power directly with one other. This increases the efficiency of the individual and at the same time the resilience of the system. Peer-to-peer networks are also resistant to failures because there is no single central component that can bring down the entire network. Potentially, the system is infinitely scalable due to the number of new participants.

The peer-to-peer network creates a horizontal structure in which all participants are equal actors. The work P2P contemplates the impact of the digital age on the art world and introduces new possibilities of artistic exchange, distribution and preservation of digital works. Moreover, P2P takes as its theme the value of collaboration, equal access to content and, in the case of Eva & Franco Mattes’ work, to art and the democratisation of the creative process. By hosting the work, the Frankfurter Kunstverein, as a public institution, contributes directly to the dissemination and preservation of art on the internet.

At the same time, the P2P installation stands for the conceptual approach of the artist duo. Content, form and material are mutually dependent. The additional empty space is a common feature that implies further endless expansion to accommodate more data. The monolith in the cage, simultaneously covered and framed, becomes the formal centre of the artworks and proof of the pervasiveness of their content, which invites active and decentralised participation in the torrent network.

What is a peer-to-peer network and how did these distributed work communities come into being? The use of peer-to-peer networks began in the early 2000s. At the same time, technologies like the file-sharing protocol BitTorrent and software like Napster and eDonkey2000 spread. They revolutionised the exchange of digital content, as for the first time they bypassed dependence on centralised servers and bandwidth limitations. For many artists, for example, this meant being able to share their artwork directly with a wide online audience without having to rely on established distribution channels. The technology was groundbreaking in the field of music production especially. A well-known example was the band Radiohead, who offered their album In Rainbows as a free download via their website in 2007 and gave fans the opportunity to set the price themselves.

Parallel to this, peer-to-peer networks were also used for illegal activities such as sharing copyrighted content. The uncontrolled distribution of files led to significant copyright infringements and financial losses for artists and rights holders. At the same time, it toppled the entire music publishing industry, which had to completely rethink its income source as a result. There have been numerous legal battles and restrictions to curb the illegal distribution of content via peer-to-peer networks.

As often the case with the emergence of new technologies, traditional business models come under pressure and others emerge. Peer-to-peer networks have played a significant role in democratising information sharing and creating communities of like-minded people. Peer-to-peer technology has become the foundation of cryptocurrencies and blockchain networks, which once again herald radical change.

BEFNOED is the title of an ongoing series of videos that Eva & Franco Mattes have been producing since 2013. These short films are published online, on obscure, peripheral or forgotten social networks around the world, in Cambodia, Russia, China or Pakistan, without comment and without reference to any art project: places where the works are meant to be found almost by chance.

The videos show people carrying out seemingly meaningless actions that they have received as instructions from the artistic duo. Eva & Franco Mattes have hired these performers anonymously via online marketplaces for digital services, so-called crowdsourcing platforms. The people film themselves without knowing who the instructions come from, which audience the films are intended for or what goals are to be pursued with them. Different workers interpret the same performance with slight variations: a military salute with a bucket on one’s head, standing on a ladder, licking a car rim, two people connecting their heads through a tube.

For the exhibition, these films are spatially staged in such a way that the viewers, if they want to see the works, also have to perform a physical act that contradicts behaviour normally found in museum spaces.

The visitors have to lie on the floor under a monitor tent or lift each other up in order to look at one of the monitors that points to the ceiling above their heads. If they wish to see the images, they are obliged to squeeze between the monitor and the wall. This creates a physical interaction with the artwork that reveals a correlation between the unaware performers on the net and the unaware performers in the room. In the same way that the digitally recruited workers bow to a request from the artists, so too the visitors must adapt their behaviour to the artwork. Both actions, the digital and the analogue, celebrate absurdity, which at some points can bring to mind Erwin Wurm’s Living Sculptures. ‘We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us’ (Marshall McLuhan). The repetition of externally determined actions online is a highly common and successful practice, upon which the platform TikTok, for example, has built an entire business model.

As with numerous other works by the artistic duo, BEFNOED also works with irony, whereby the user’s behaviour in front of and behind the screen is humorously caricatured.

Eva & Franco Mattes address the mechanisms of labour in the digital world, which trade workforce as a commodity on an internationally digital labour market. The title BEFNOED is an acronym for ‘By everyone, for no one, every day’. Thus, the central question in this video series concerns gig workers, the people in the crowdsourcing economy, their work, authorship and individuality. Someone on the other side of the screen is fulfilling our requests, whether they be clicks, likes, online shopping. An action that seems immaterial to us has a direct impact on someone’s work on the other side of the world.

Crowdsourcing platforms function as anonymous marketplaces for employees and employers looking for short-term jobs for HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks). This concerns all services that can be outsourced online and are summarised by the term ‘human as a service’.

So-called contractors are often interposed between the employee and the employer for the purpose of ensuring the latter anonymity. The advantage of this work model is that it represents a quick and easy way to earn money flexibly. The disadvantage is the risk that workers’ rights and non-wage labour costs are circumvented. As a Facebook content moderator aptly describes in Eva & Franco Mattes’ work The Bots, it creates ‘a digital proletariat and a digital factory that produces no concrete products and is driven by profit alone’.

The first crowdsourcing platform for micro-labour (gigs), Mechanical Turk, was set up by Amazon in 2005. This marked the beginning of an increasingly deregulated labour market or labour pool. Mechanical Turk is the best-known and largest example of a platform where micro-tasks that cannot (yet) be performed using computing power are commissioned at low cost. There is a sense that this is a transitional period in which humans are still doing these kinds of jobs until they are taken over by algorithms. An important point is that it is still much more profitable to exploit low-paid human labour than to pay engineers to develop software. According to estimates, the turks’ average wage is around 2 dollars per hour. The micro work offered is often remunerated with credits on Amazon accounts – thus representing a double profit for the platform. Mechanical Turk was followed by numerous other crowdsourcing platforms such as Clickworker or Appjobber.

The original Mechanical Turk (1770) was a seemingly ground-breaking invention: a chess playing machine commissioned by Empress Maria Theresa of Austria in the early days of the Industrial Revolution. Externally, it resembled the other automata of the time. The machine could imitate the movements of a human playing chess, but a person was hiding inside it. For almost a century, the trick led viewers to believe that a machine could play chess. So the name of the Mechanical Turk platform is intended to suggest something that feels like a machine but has humans behind it. Humans work to fill the gaps of algorithms while training the latter to do a better job in future. For this reason, their work serving algorithms is less and less considered actual work and takes place invisibly in the background. The work BEFNOED provides visibility to these otherwise invisible workers, allowing them to engage in creative actions that are sometimes humorous and occasionally even poetic.

Three-channel-video installation
3D animation and machine learning algorythms
05:44 min
Sound Phil Hoffart
Courtesy the artist

Nassim L’Ghoul works with 3D animation to generate digital images that he creates individually for his films. L’Ghoul has produced a new three-channel work for the Frankfurter Kunstverein. His moving images unfold monumentally on three screens positioned in space. The central narrative runs in the middle, extended by two lateral projections.

The title of the work, Zwei Schritte vor, ein Schritt zurück (Two Steps Forward, One Step Back), refers to a practice known as pilgrimage walking, which stems from the tradition of processional rituals. L’Ghoul’s films do not develop in a linear fashion, but rather seem to follow the logic of dreams in which personal associations and fantasies weave and flow into one another. Inanimate objects are given life, have mouths or can walk, miniaturised people move through giant sceneries or speak into oversized telephone receivers, while fantastic beings appear as if from nowhere, only to disappear at once. Individual figures repeatedly break through the picture surfaces and enter a different, underlying dimension.

The main feature of his chosen, reduced aesthetics is the 3D basic model without textures. He models his figures himself, but also makes use of found material that he reshapes for his 3D applications through skilful use of artificial intelligence. He uses physically based light calculations, which the computer performs as an intermediate step in the process of creating images. Using a speedy working method, he omits every unnecessary step from conception to realisation.

The artist seeks the open, unfinished form by using only so-called ‘prepass images’. These are created during the animation of images in the computer process, but are not intended to be the finished result. He uses the intermediate step and deliberately chooses an aesthetic of digital, image-generating technologies. This constitutes the porous, translucent nature of his worlds, which are dream-like in their openness and make it possible to break through from one layer to the next at any time. L’Ghoul condenses his characters and narratives from out of the darkness.  This process results in a dark visual world consisting of black and white dots that reinforce the dreamy, unreal feel.

Sound plays a central role for the artist, who has also produced music videos. For the new work, he has collaborated with sound artist Phil Hoffart. The soundscape embeds L’Ghoul’s images in a tonal atmosphere that highlights individual elements, lending a certain acoustic three-dimensionality.

Forms and figures dominate his works, entering his worlds detached from a classical iconographic interpretation to assert a visual autonomy. This corresponds to an updated practice of sampling, which has established itself as a common working method with the digital culture of reels and memes, and defines the work of numerous artists today.

Employing different visual worlds, Nassim L’Ghoul creates a dimension all of his own from them. His surreal worlds and stories are inspired by art motifs from the Middle Ages and Gothic painting, myths and popular stories. Yet they do not take place in a linear and logical way, but remain open and associative.

Nassim L’Ghoul (*1997 in Bad Soden, DE) has studied electronic media at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach (DE) with Prof. Alexander Oppermann since 2017. In 2020 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (AT). He has won numerous prizes, including a scholarship from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes and the Rundgangpreis of the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach. Among others, Nassim L’Ghoul has exhibited his work at the following institutions: Zollamt Studios, Offenbach am Main (DE), L187, Offenbach am Main (DE), Magma Maria, Offenbach am Main (DE) and at the Best Austrian Animation Festival, Vienna (AT).

 

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Julien Prévieux (*1974) explores the visualization and functionality of AI technologies, and the principles of machine learning. In the video “Where Is My (Deep) Mind?” Previeux translates invisible digital processes into human actions that are performatively executed.

Usually these processes take place in neural networks that aren’t really physically accessible; they are only generally perceptible via interfaces. Prévieux relocates these interfaces to a physical space similar to a laboratory or test site that becomes a stage for the four performers. As in robotics, the movement sequences of the figures are tested for stability by using different objects to bring them out of balance. In addition to training systems with movement, Prévieux also introduces the process of training systems with language. Dialogue of the trials with balls, books and hats come from Facebook’s AI research lab. In 2017 the lab created dialogical test arrangements for algorithms to learn negotiation techniques and strategies. Another part of the training data comes from databases of recorded human conversations such as counselling interviews. The dialogue on gambling was based on the conversation of two chatbots called Eliza and Parry, computer programs that communicated with each other in natural language in 1972. These machine systems had already been developed in 1972 to practice communication patterns in order to become plausible conversation partners with people. The mechanical behaviour, both in physical movement and verbal argumentation, leads to a hopeless endless loop, which is contrasted by the body language and voice of the performers.

“Where Is My Mind?” is the title of a 1988 song from American indie rock band Pixies. It has been used as the soundtrack in numerous films such as “Fight Club”, “Trainspotting” or the series “Mr. Robot”. The lyrics allude to the feeling of a parallel plane of perception where there is no control over the mind. A state of undefined limbo between consciousness and intoxication, between dream and reality. Prévieux extends the title with the adjective “(deep)” in reference to the concept of Deep Learning. The sober transfer of mechanical processes into performative action helps the film succeed in inverting the principles of AI to the point of absurdity. This stylistic hold aids Prévieux in rendering the mechanisms of deep learning visible, and also ironically debunks mythic and often threatening ideas that circle in current debate.

These three artists work as a collective. Tega Brain is an artist and environmental engineer who combines art, ecology and engineering in her work. Julian Oliver works on open source projects to preserve privacy, critically investigating technologies. Oliver is co-author of the “Critical Engineering Manifesto” (2011). Bengt Sjölén is an independent software and hardware designer, hacker and artist. Among other things, he is concerned with the program-controlled generation of design, hardware and code.

Current debate poises artificial intelligence as a technology that has the potential to solve universal problems. A central challenge today is the drastic climate change caused by human intervention. In response, artists Tega Brain, Julian Oliver and Bengt Sjölén developed “Asunder”, an AI-based fictitious “environmental manager”. The work consists of a high-performance computer and a specially developed neural network that analyses live satellite, climate, geology, biodiversity, topography, population and social media data. The “environmental manager” is constantly connected to the internet for the duration of the exhibition and continually generates new scenarios, arranged as a triptych. “Asunder” presents case studies of different geological regions such as the Arctic, the Brazilian rainforest, Silicon Valley or Dubai, whose problems have been examined by “Asunder”. The visualization shows different simulations of future scenarios in order to develop different solutions to problems. Thus, geological measures for change are proposed, assuming that optimization of the planet in the age of the Anthropocene is viable through geoengineering.

In her 2018 article “The Environment is not a System”, Tega Brain references theorists Nancy Katherine Hayles and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, who consider our knowledge of the planet as a complex system insufficient. The term system implies a whole made of individual parts, manageable by controlling these separate components. Complex ecological realities are insufficiently simulated by mathematical models and formal input-output relations. Computer programs can be used to calculate possible scenarios, but as with all models, they only represent a simplified representation of reality.

In general, AI applications are developed with interest-orientated objectives in mind. Whoever programs the systems sets parameters, which always comes with the risk of distortion, or so-called “bias”. “Asunder” does not situate the human being as the central sole-reference factor, but has included a balance between natural resources, social justice, the protection of endangered species and sustainable production. Viewers will find some of the solutions the system calculates disturbing, as it creates simulations that recommend, for example, the resettlement of entire cities or their extinction.

Fito Segrera’s work 1 & N Chairs consists of four elements: a wooden chair, two monitors, and a camera. The camera records the chair, zooming into certain areas and photographing a small fragment of the image. The image is transferred via Internet to Microsoft’s image recognition service and translated into a verbal description using algorithms. This is then shown on the right screen. At the same time, the description of the image also serves as search term for an online image search. The image found via this search is shown on the left screen. The process is continuously repeated with a new image fragment and textual description each time.

Segrera’s system conducts a kind of image interpretation and abstraction that one could describe as artificial imagination. The system usually recognises the object – a chair – but often interprets non-existent objects into the image. Segrera’s work is based on a programmed algorithm that uses a random generator to continuously create new combinations and options, offering several possible interpretations of the same object.

1 & N Chairs references the work One and Three Chairs by conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth from 1965. In this work, Kosuth exhibited a handmade wooden chair together with a photograph of it and a dictionary entry. Segrera’s title is almost identical to Kosuth’s, except the natural number three has been replaced by the mathematical symbol N, which stands for any number in the set of natural numbers. N stands for the programmed system’s endless search for new image-word pairings. Both Kosuth’s historical work as well as Segrera’s make reference to Plato’s conception of the Idea of an object and thus raise questions about the relationship between representation, concept, and material referent. Kosuth attributed this logical ability to human thought. Segrera, by contrast, replaces this process with mathematical calculations. While Kosuth’s work takes a static definition of an object in language and image as its starting point, Segrera’s automated system is in process of constant investigation that produces a flow of perpetually new images and words from the Internet.

Fito Segrera (b.1983) is a Colombian artist, technologist and the head of the department Research and Creation at Chronus Art Center, Shanghai. He studied fine arts and audiovisual Multimedia production at Jorge Tadeo Lozano University of Bogotá (CO), as well as Design and Technology The New School, New York (US).

Dries Depoorter’s Surveillance Paparazzi thematises the phenomenon of global surveillance in public space. The work taps into various surveillance cameras worldwide that record and transmit unencrypted images. It was possible to hack into these cameras via the Internet so that live recordings of stores, entryways, and public spaces could be directly integrated into the work.

When Depoorter’s software recognises publicly known persons, with the help of Microsoft’s Azure Computer Vision API, the image becomes visible in real-time within the exhibition. Surveillance Paparazzi’s monitors then show the name of the VIP, the live image, an official image from Wikipedia, and the corresponding GPS location on a world map.

Automated facial recognition software and ‘information crawlers’ increasingly read our search requests, uploaded image files, text info, and saved profiles. They trace collective behaviour patterns and generate behavioural predictions in order to both systematise commercial evaluations as well as to regulate and manipulate macro-processes in the greater infrastructure.

Belgian artist Dries Depoorter (b. 1991) lives and works in Ghent (BE), where he studied Media Arts at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Most of his work deals with online identity, privacy and surveillance on the internet.

The Thing That Isn’t by Jerry Galle combines a word-processing system with a drawing robot. The work is controlled by two computers, which use electronic components to manoeuvre the drawing arm and broadcast spoken sentences out of the speakers. The automated system executes a programme that determines its drawing. The programme also examines the drawing during the process, comments on it and modifies its subsequent behaviour. Galle fed the learning machines with texts discussing themes such as artificial intelligence or the CIA’s interview techniques as well as essays about art and pedagogy. Algorithms from the field of computer linguistics (NLTK – Natural Language Toolkit) then search for meaning in the texts.

First, the texts are taken apart into smaller units which are classified according to shared traits and arranged under various headings, such as art, language, or psychology, which have been predetermined by Galle. In the second step, the whole text is searched for connections between individual words, for example synonyms, similar dictionary entries, etymological connections, and frequency of word use. In the third step, it generates a decision tree – a tree-like representation of the connections and correlations within the body of text. This decision tree creates vectors, which the movements of the drawing head are then aligned to. At the same time, an independent sentence is generated using words from the original texts and the decision tree. The sentence determines the actions of the drawing arm and is also spoken out over the speakers so that humans can perceive the essence of this automated thought process.

In this never-ending process, The Thing That Isn’t searches for the correlations between words and their possible meanings. This doesn’t lead to a conclusive interpretation, but rather to a network of many interrelated interpretations. Information is extracted and repeatedly altered. Does the loss of information in the translation process come about because the field of terms is constantly expanding or because the software’s abilities are expanding to include complex ‘thought’? General questions arise concerning the abilities and limits of algorithmic perception. Would we trust a machine to have subjective, aesthetic experiences? How meaningful or absurd is it to have machines simulate human behaviour?

The work of Belgian artist Jerry Galle (b. 1969) deals with the relationship between digital technology and contemporary culture. Galle is affiliated to KASK School of Arts University College Ghent (BE) as postdoctoral artistic researcher.

Esther Hovers’ work False Positives thematises the systems underlying so-called smart cameras. These cameras not only record their environments, but also interpret the images in real-time. Human behaviour, our movements in space, are analysed and compared with learned patterns. When a system detects anomalous movements, it categorises the behaviour as suspicious. At the same time, the system of pattern recognition remains open enough to allow a certain leeway so that most anomalies are revealed to be false alarms or ‘false positives’.

Hovers worked with security experts to determine eight suspicious movement patterns: standing still, fast movements, lonely objects, placement on a corner, clusters breaking apart, synchronised movements, repeatedly looking back, and deviant directions. Hovers’ images come from an administrative district in Brussels. She photographed both random pedestrians and staged movements through public space. In digital post-production, she assembles up to twenty shots into a single image, condensing the events over an expanded stretch of time into a single constructed moment. The synthesis refers to the methods of intelligent surveillance systems, which process larger temporal correlations.

Algorithms control an ever-increasing number of systems, from managing complex processes and infrastructures to rating individuals. The population is also increasingly aware of these applications. They have begun to transform people’s behaviour. Systems and people reciprocally determine each other, with each adjusting to the other. What is considered to be normal or abnormal is no longer just determined by a social collective, but also by data and statistics. These mathematical models of the world are applied via algorithms. There remains the question, however, of exactly which calculations and statistics underlie the measurements of the government authorities and private firms that commission these systems. Which classifications eventually lead to ‘false positives’? Which individual traits are held as suspicious and possibly criminal? Do we want to live in a society where algorithmically calculated estimations lead to the quantification and classification of individuals?

Dutch artist Esther Hovers (b. 1991) graduated in photography from the Royal Academy of Art, the Hague (NL). Since graduating her work has been featured in numerous international exhibitions, in-cluding C/O Berlin Foundation (DE), Alan Gallery, Istanbul (TR), Festival Circulation(s) in Paris (FR), Foam Photography Museum, Amsterdam (NL) and the National Gallery in Prague (CZ).