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]
Duration 8:31 minutes
Year 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.
