Surveying the Distance (Social Class)

Single channel video, 00:12

Pierre Gervois’s Surveying the Distance (Social Class) interrogates the intersection of artificial intelligence and human perception, engaging in a dialogue between machinic vision and historical representation. Centering on Fragonard’s The Stolen Kiss (1760), Gervois submits the Rococo painting to algorithmic scrutiny, allowing AI to dismantle and reconstruct its visual and social codes. The result is an unsettling exposure of class dynamics within art history, revealing the structural ideologies embedded in aesthetic traditions.

As AI ‘watches’ and learns, its output reflects not emotion but the mechanics of power: social mobility, privilege, and encoded hierarchies. The piece challenges viewers to consider whether machines can ever truly ‘see’ art or whether their gaze merely exposes our own cultural conditioning. Within Duets, Gervois’s work extends the exhibition’s examination of relationality by asking how the human-machine dialectic reshapes artistic interpretation in the digital age.

Gervois’s interrogation of AI as a tool of both replication and reinvention compels viewers to question the agency embedded within digital systems. By appropriating a painting loaded with class symbolism, he magnifies the tension between artistic legacy and technological intervention. His work disrupts the hierarchy between human and machine interpretation, positioning AI not as a neutral observer but as an active participant in reshaping cultural narratives.

– Auronda Scalera & Alfredo Cramerotti, curators