2025
Form Under Observation
Sculpture
Title ‘Crouching (0.44), Covering torso(0.52) Sad(0.23),
Nudity likelihood (0.61)
Material [Wet 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
Test Tiles
Title ‘Test tiles’
Material [Clay, Copper Sulfate, Racomitrium microcarpon, Borax,
Slime mould]
Size 17 x 17 x 9 cm
Year 2025
Sound installation
Title ‘How to read character in the face and to
determine the capacity for love, business, or crime’
Material [Book: Physiognomy by Leila Holt 1864,
Text-to-speech algorithm, Bone conduction speaker]
Duration 8:31 minutes
Year 2025
While the artist’s studio is often imagined as a private, self-contained space of creative freedom, Kind’s studio setup shows it as infiltrated by historical and contemporary systems of judgment. From classical canons of proportion and physiognomy to algorithmic social media platforms and surveillance systems, bodies and artworks are never neutral: they are continuously measured, classified, and evaluated. In this context, we unconsciously adapt; modifying gestures, forms, or compositions to align with prevailing attention regimes.
The classical material, malleable clay is used as the material under negotiation. Clay sculptures as well as their test tiles, are shaped through dialogue with both historic and automated systems. Traditionally test tiles are used to study glaze behavior for the final ceramic sculpture. 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.
What appears neutral; a test tile, an ear, a wet clay sculpture, and a surveillance view, become sites of judgment. Algoritmic readings on a screen hovering mismatching skeletons on the sculpture without resolvement. Test tiles are matched with pedagogical readings from a 18th-century physiognomy manual, texts that historically claimed to discern character, intelligence, and moral worth from ears. By putting the viewer in the position of comparing, and finding meaning in the pose of the clay body, the works enacts the process of judgment, forming the conditions that bias and enable machine learning and automation.
