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

Preview

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

ILSE KIND

About

THE VALLEY ① HAPPINESS MACHINE ⓸ LIFETIME APPROVAL RATE 96% ⓰ OUR MIND AS A HOST ❹ SPONSORED ① PAREIDOLIA ⑰ BLOB #1 ❼BAARMOEDER ❺SMUDGE︎ BEYOND THE PLEASURE︎

THE VALLEY ①
HAPPINESS MACHINE ⓸
LIFETIME APPROVAL RATE 96% ⓰
OUR MIND AS A HOST ❹
SPONSORED ①
PAREIDOLIA ⑰
BLOB #1 ❼
BAARMOEDER ❺
SMUDGE︎
BEYOND THE PLEASURE︎