2025
Test Tiles
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, Aluminium]
Duration 8:31 minutes
Year 2025
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, 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, becomes a site of judgment. The test tiles are matched with pedagogical readings from a 18th-century physiognomy manual, a pseudoscience that historically claimed to discern character, intelligence, and moral worth from ears. A generated child’s voice reads aloud the reasoning from the book; how an ears’ size, countour, folds, helix, lobe, antitragus, angle and color define its meaning; pedagogical act enacting the act of comparing for the viewer.
The tiles, reveal how easily human judgment becomes procedural and normalized, conditions that later allow such logics to become instrumentalized as a political and ideological tool, in systems now automated.
