2025
Test Tiles
Title Test tiles
Year 2025-ongoing
Material Clay, Silica, copper carbonate, sodaash, kaolin, copper sulfate, racomitrium microcarpon, borax, slime mould
Size 17 x 17 x 9 cm
Title Diagnosis
Year 2025
Material Sound, Computer vision pipeline(classification afterLomax, Physiognomy, 1884,measurement after Bertillon,La photographie judiciaire,1890), text-to-speech, boneconduction speaker, aluminium,Test Tiles, camera
Duration 8’31”
Traditionally, test tiles are part of the artistic act of measuring, comparing, and selecting, that usually remains invisible. They are tools of judgment in the studio, determining what material is deemed worthy of the final piece. Kind replaces these tiles with ears, applying the logic of measuring and selecting clay and glaze to the anatomy of the human body.
Ears carry a long scientific history of being read to define a persons’ character, intelligence and moral worth. Till today, ears remain an identifyer in biometric surveillance systems now automated. Kind stages this continuity by matching the test tiles-as-ears with an 18th-century physiognomy manual read aloud by a child’s voice; a pseudoscience that claimed to define meaning from an ear’s size, countour, folds, helix, lobe, antitragus, angle and color.
Read together, the tiles and the recitation expose how easily subjective judgment is dressed up as procedure, conditions that allow such logics to become instruments for political and ideological control.
