Surveying the Distance (Social Class)

SURVEYING THE DISTANCE (SOCIAL CLASS), 2025, single-channel video, 00:11, variable dimensions.

How do machines see human artworks? To attempt to know how machines think, Pierre Gervois randomly picked Fragonard’s painting The Stolen Kiss (1760), and imagined it as seen by a machine, analyzing this human artwork for exactly what it is, in an emotionless manner: a painting representing white people for an audience of white people. As the quasi-sentient machine plays and replays this image over and over for its own nascent enjoyment, it starts to discern one fundamental feature of Humanity: the dream of social mobility. The artwork allows the viewer to witness, uninvited, the exact moment when the machine comes to this realization.