ILSE KIND 





2025





Crouching (0.44), Covering torso(0.52), Sad(0.23), Nudity likelihood (0.61)  






Sculpture
Title ‘Crouching (0.44), Covering torso(0.52) Sad(0.23),
Nudity likelihood (0.61) 
Material [Clay, Camera, Pose estimation algorithm, classification pipeline]
 Size 80 x 65 x 40 cm
Year 2025
 

  Video
Title ‘False positive’
  Material [Aluminium, Ipad, Pose estimation algorithm, Camera]
   Size 29 x 11 x 5 cm
 Full HD
Year 2025
















Visual systems have long sought to render bodies legible. The classical canon of proportion once codified ideal beauty; physiognomy labeled  features ‘pointy, ‘sagging’, ‘large’ to assign character and social worth. Visual codes long shape how bodies are read, held, represented and valued. Today, this practice persists invisibilly within social media and surveillance algorithms, shaping new norms and reinforcing adaptation.  

In response, Kind hands part of her artistic agency to recognition technologies. Malleable blobs of clay are shaped and reshaped by hand in dialogue with computer vision algorithms, turning gestures into probability scores, and the clay into statistics. This feedback loop between gesture and code continues until the algorithm detects the clay as a body “worth attention”. At that moment of recognition, the form is finished and refined at the key markers for the algorithm, materializing the treshold where the machine mistakes its own projections for a human body. A false positive where limbs act as lures and silhouette suggest torso.  

The algorithmic gaze becomes visible in the accompanying video; a  machinic eye tracking, measuring and animating the sculpture. Life-like skeletal overlays, confidence scores, and behavioral classification waste are extracted from the body, while the sculpture remains fixed, silent and depleted, between algorithmic logic and material reality. 













2025





Test tiles




Ears ‘Test tiles’
[Clay, Copper Sulfate, Racomitrium microcarpon, Borax, Slime mould]
17 x 17 x 9 cm
2025

Sound installation ‘How to read character in the face and to
determine the capacity for love, business, or crime’
[Book: Physiognomy by Leila Holt 1864,
Text-to-speech algorithm, Bone conduction speaker]
8:31 minutes
2025










Traditionally test tiles are used to study glaze behavior for the final ceramic piece. An artistic act of measuring, comparing, and selecting, that usually remains invisible. These tiles are tools of judgment, quietly determining what is deemed worthy of the final piece. 
 
Kind replaces these tiles with ears, applying the logic of test tiles to the human body.  They are paired with a computer generated child’s voice reading aloud from an 18th-century physiognomy manual, texts that historically claimed to discern character, intelligence, and moral worth from ears. What appears as a neutral act of testing reveals itself as a system of judgment that predetermines worth, echoing the criteria that have long shaped artistic pedagogy. 

The viewer, attempting to discern which ear is being judged, becomes part of this process. In searching for difference or meaning in the isolated ears, they begin to judge alongside the system. By exposing a logic that usually operates implicitly, the work reveals how easily human judgment becomes codified, procedural, and normalized, conditions that later allow such logics to be automated.








2024





the Valley 






Sculpture ‘Hand 41’
[Silicone]
23 x 20 x 10 cm
2024

Sculpture ‘Hand 71’
[Silicone]
29 x 11 x 5 cm
2024

Sculpture ‘Hand 21’
[Silicone, Mechanics and electronics]
23 x 17 x 9 cm
2023


Sculpture ‘HAND 14’
[Silicone]
21 x 18 x 8 cm
2023
  
Video ‘Lifetime Approval Rate 96%’
[Behind-the-scenes documentation of the
artist performing a data annotation task,
with simultaneous heartbeat monitoring.
LAION-5B Training Database.]
Full HD, stereo sound
7:25 minutes
Sound design: MYNRGY
2024

















Perched atop the mountain’s summit, where humanity has long sought to touch the divine, the exhibition exposes the physical-world foundations of Artificial Intelligence as it transcends earthly heights.

In the hidden workforce of artificial intelligence, every click matters. Ilse Kind's work draws from her experience as an annotation worker, a silent witness to the unpredictable, repetitive, and underpaid labor shaping machine intelligence. Bound by confidentiality, she captured what was allowed: the clicks of her trackpad, the rhythm of her heartbeat as she worked. In collaboration with MYNRGY, these sounds are amplified into a soundscape, revealing the unseen conditions of this digital labor. 

Lifetime Approval Rate 96%, a video work at the heart of the exhibition, shows annotation clicks on a trackpad while exposing the fragmented nature of AI training data—bizarre juxtapositions of medical photographs, miniature army models and cowboy toys. Trained on this erratic material, AI reveals its limits most clearly in its attempts to recreate human hands—producing deformed, anatomically flawed gestures that expose its dependence on this hidden workforce. These glitches take sculptural form in Hand 14, Hand 21, Hand 45, and Hand 71, each shaped by Kind’s own hands yet assembled through the logic of diffusion algorithms, bridging the digital and the physical, machine learning and human labor. 

Throughout history, mountains have symbolized enlightenment and the pursuit of divine power. In this elevated setting, Kind’s work reimagines these aspirations within the context of technological progress at every cost. The summit embodies humanity’s drive for godlike creation- artificial intelligence as a modern Prometheus, reaching toward omnipotence, yet still bound by the unseen hands that shape it.



Teaser












2024





Happiness Machine






Installation ‘Happiness machine’
[Pose-landmark detection system, Camera, Aluminium,
Irrigation nozzle, Tube, Water]
110 x 110 x 150 cm
2024
  
 Sculpture ‘BLOB #2’
[Wet Clay]
90 x 70 x 60 cm
2024




















In the gaze of algorithms, human bodies are sculpted by data flows. Surveillance systems track how we move and express, while moulding us into simplified, predefined forms. These systems prioritize basic emotional states, fueling emotions like happiness. Treated as malleable data containers, BLOBs (Binary Large Objects), we are reduced to the data we produce or lack. Simplified to analyzable shapes, we are left with only the most basic expressive features."

In this installation, the clay sculpture embodies this condition. Shaped in a predefined "happy" pose to satisfy the pose recognition system, its survival depends on water. A feedback mechanism irrigates only when its form aligns with the algorithm's expectations. Yet, this act of validation, meant to preserve, gradually strips it of its identity. Too much water risks dissolution, softening the figure, while too little causes it to dry out and crumbles away, returning back to soil. Here, the act of being seen becomes both a lifeline and a form of erasure, caught between becoming and being in systems that prize visibility over human complexity.  


Teaser



















2024





Lifetime Approval Rate 96%



Sculpture ‘HAND 14’
[Silicone]
21x18 cm
2023
  
Mechanical Sculpture ‘HAND 21’
[Silicone, Mechanics]
23x17 cm
2023

Video Installation ‘Lifetime Approval Rate 96%’
[Annotation work on A training platform,
Laion-5B Database, Recorded heartbeat,
Raspberry pi, LCD Screens, Speaker]
Variable size
2024


Sculpture ‘Training data’
[Silicone]
Variable size
2023













Documentation video 




Hands, central to human expression and labor, have long carried hidden emotions and involuntary messages. Once symbols of resilience and alienation in the shift from manual craftsmanship to mechanized industry, hands now navigate the blurred boundaries between physical and digital spaces. In Ilse Kind’s work, hands take on new meaning within the digital age, shaped by Artificial Intelligence.

This dual installation features Hand 14, Hand 21, Hand 45 and Hand 71, sculptures that physically resemble AI-generated hands: distorted and anatomically flawed. Their unfamiliar gestures signal the hidden dependence of AI systems on human resources; particularly those of undervalued annotation workers. Their hands, compelled by economic necessity, tirelessly train AI systems what human reality looks like. This dynamic reflects how human labor is quietly absorbed and discarted to create the illusion of autonomous technology, leaving their contributions obscured and unacknowledged.  

The video work Lifetime Approval Rate 96% reveals these hidden mechanisms, offering a glimpse into the biases interwoven in databases, and the relentless, repetitive clicks that are the lifeline of AI systems.

By blending AI-generated forms with their human origins, the installation explores the hidden relationship between creator and creation exposing the pervasive extraction of value from the hands that sustain our evolving technological ecosystem.


    [Accompanying essay ’Handwerker; a human resource farm’ on request ︎]

















2022





OUR MIND AS A HOST 



Video Installation
    [Database with 1866 images,
    321 sounds of parasites
    and surveillance technologies] 
    750 x 300 cm 

























Documentation video 




Our Mind as a Host explores the unsettling overlap between parasites and surveillance systems, revealing them as new species that feed on human bodies, behavior, and perception. The viewer becomes the host for the works’ parasitic form, a subject of manipulation rather than a passive observer.

‘‘New species are entering our world and living at our expense. As parasites, hidden surveillance technologies are preying and feeding on us. When they find a weak spot, their biometric algorithms crawl under our skin without consent. They modify behavior, interpret and maybe even shape one’s being, often without us noticing.’’

Drawing on a hand-assembled archive of 1,866 images and 321 sound samples, Our Mind as a Host forges a taxonomy of control. It compares the form and behavior of parasites and surveillance technologies, from facial recognition cameras to biometric sensors

The result is a psychovisual experiment: an a-rhytmic fast-moving montage in which image pairs are arranged by mental association, controling the viewers eye over the screen. Just as surveillance and parasites can reshape behavior, Our Mind as a Host manipulates the viewer’s perception, producing a “third image” in the brain, and use our mind as a host.