Humanum Unknown Error (2012)
Custom CAPTCHA / QR Temporary Tattoos.
Alan Turing laid the philosophical-mathematical foundations of the Golem that were to become part of our lives. Out of profound understanding of the implications of the machine he had created, he also conceived the Turing Test - a kind of humanity meter that assesses the degree of similarity between man and machine.
There are still no computers that can pass the Turing Test, but a Reverse Turing Test has been devised in recent years. This test, now administered by a machine and targeted at a human, allows computers to determine whether the entities facing them are flesh and blood. We've all seen it in the form of CAPTCHAs - those twisted alpha-numeric symbols decipherable only by the human brain and therefore non-accessible to machines.
These actually embody a human-readable only language instead of the machine-readable only languages we are familiar with, i.e., barcodes and QR squares. Both languages have emerged out of digital reality and are mutually exclusive. Machine language remains unreadable to the human eye, and Captchas are undecipherable by the machine brain. Thus, they effectively distinguish between man and machine.
In this work, by allowing visitors to prepare their own erasable tattoos, with coded messages designed exclusively for humans or non-humans, I liberated the CAPTCHA from its digital administrators and turned it into a tool helping people determine whether the entities they face are human or virtual and address them directly, without digital mediation, but with digital assistance. Thanks to the separation enabled by the two mutually exclusive languages, the machine once more becomes a tool rather than a communication interface. What happens when you try to combine those two exclusive languages? Is there an entity that would be able to decipher this new, hybrid language? Can we envision such an entity based on a hybridized form of those languages?
