ILSE
KIND 

Perched atop the mountain’s summit, where humanity has long sought to touch the divine, the exhibition dismantles the myth of Artificial Intelligence as an autonomous force. 

Ilse Kind's work emerges from her own experience in the hidden workforce of artificial intelligence as an annotation worker; an unacknowledged role in which humans label and evaluate data to train and maintain AI systems under unpredictable, repetitive and underpaid circumstances.

At the center of the exhibition, the video Lifetime Approval Rate 96% presents a full-length Human Intelligence Task. Its title refers to the score that evaluates workers’ performance. Precisely instructed, closely monitored and bound by confidentiality, Kind captured what was allowed: the clicks of her hand on the trackpad and the rhythm of her heartbeat as she worked. These sound recordings were made into a soundscape by MYNRGY, amplifying the bodily rhythms of digital labor that usually remain unheard.

On screen, repetitive trackpad clicks annotate training data, substituted with a leaked training database, used to train AI models in generating images of hands. Medical photographs collide with artist drawings, miniature army figures, and cowboy toys. Fed with this material, AI falters most visibly in its attempts to recreate the human hand; producing distorted, anatomically flawed gestures.

The AI-generated output of the same model trained on this database take sculptural form in Click 14, Click 21, Click 45, and Click 71. Modeled with Kind’s own annotating hands and assembled through the logic of diffusion algorithms, the works collapse boundaries between human and machine, digital process and physical form. Failures that signal to AI’s lifeline of human judgment, selection, and correction. 


[Accompanying essay ’Handwerker; a human resource farm’ on request ︎]


Teaser

In the gaze of algorithms, human bodies are sculpted by data flows. Surveillance systems track how we move and express, while moulding us into simplified, predefined forms. These systems prioritize basic emotional states, fueling emotions like happiness. Treated as malleable data containers, BLOBs (Binary Large Objects), we are reduced to the data we produce or lack. Simplified to analyzable shapes, we are left with only the most basic expressive features."

In this installation, the clay sculpture embodies this condition. Shaped in a predefined "happy" pose to satisfy the pose recognition system, its survival depends on water. A feedback mechanism irrigates only when its form aligns with the algorithm's expectations. Yet, this act of validation, meant to preserve, gradually strips it of its identity. Too much water risks dissolution, softening the figure, while too little causes it to dry out and crumbles away, returning back to soil. Here, the act of being seen becomes both a lifeline and a form of erasure, caught between becoming and being in systems that prize visibility over human complexity.  


Teaser