Involuntary Capture

Involuntary Capture is the entrance poster of Isto Não é um Prompt, and it is a poster that looks back. A camera facing the sidewalk feeds a computer vision system built with supervision, which detects in real time the people, vehicles and objects passing by the façade. Each one gets a colored box, a category and a confidence score: person, car, bus, handbag.

At the door of an exhibition about artificial intelligence, the poster reminds us of what we have forgotten: data capture is already part of the daily fabric of our existence.

Whoever walks down the street sees themselves as the machine sees them. Nobody asked for anything, nobody wrote a prompt: stepping onto the sidewalk is enough to become information. The work makes visible the machinic gaze that has been among us for years: silent, constant, invisible, vigilant. Cameras on streets, in shops, at building entrances and on phones classify bodies and movements every day, and machine learning has been reading us since long before we started talking to it.

Videos of Rio de Janeiro, processed through the same filter, make up the background of Maboroshi, the robotic sculpture that closes the exhibition, as if the robot were the entity that sees everything: the real-time signal and every camera in the city.