Algorithmic Flesh

Algorithmic Flesh is an interactive installation for the Dunhuang Apsara murals — a UNESCO World Heritage site whose dance was interrupted after the Tang dynasty and survives only as arrested poses, painted by artists who had watched dancers nobody can watch again. A visitor steps onto an unmarked floor and a celestial body assembles out of mural pigment in their own attitude: the body, not a typed prompt, is what the machine is given. What the machine then does with it became the subject of the work. Its archive answers with near-equal confidence for postures it has no word for as for the ones it was built on, and when it cannot decide which ancient figure a visitor resembles it now declines to choose — a second, pale body drifts among the candidates, three seconds each. The visitor watches a machine hesitate over their own flesh. That hesitation, rather than the image, is what the work exhibits.