This interactive web artwork transforms personal movement and text into ethereal “data shadows” that embrace and subvert AI’s methods of abstraction. As participants contribute their expressions, these ghostly traces accumulate into an evolving zone of deliberate unreadability. In an environment of increasing AI engagement, these gentle and persistent actions and human ways of engaging with one another become a means of maintaining individuality in the face of AI flattening, creating a space for shared contemplation.
Taking inspiration from the Archimedes palimpsest, which overlays Byzantine prayers over Archimedes’ mathematical texts, the artwork emerges as a collective prayer of overlaying words and movement pushing against the “epistemological violence … necessary to make the world readable to a machine” (Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI).
Credits:
Creative direction: Ioana B. Jucan
Creative technologist: Aidan Nelson
Sound composition: Kite
AI/ML technologies used: Body pose landmark detection model running locally on the installation computer.
