The Algorithm Will See You Now

The series The Algorithm Will See You Now (2017) is a way to imagine and forewarn a future with wide implications. With technological advancements, in particular AI and deep learning algorithms, expert medical machines could soon examine us—exposing the fragility of the human body as one with limitations, prone to diseases, in need of medical help and ultimately with a relatively short expiration date. A human can only work so many hours and is constantly aging, yet a machine can be configured to work non-stop. In these photographs we don’t know who is examining who and to what ends, the scenario presented is open to interpretation. What happens when care is handed over to a machine and based on data alone, when human touch and affect are lost?

Batista’s ‘The Algorithm Will See You Now V’ (2017), a black-and-white photograph, features a portrait of the sort of genderless, half-ma- chine, half-organism that Donna Haraway imagines in A Cyborg Manifesto (1985). Framed from the shoulder up, Batista pictures an unclothed, eroticised, androgynous subject. A bionic hand seductively pries open the figure’s lower lip, presenting modes of gender and desire not bound by binary anatomical essentialisms. -Henry Broome for MAP Magazine

The installation of The Algorithm Will See You Now (2017) plays a big part in understanding and experiencing the work. It includes hanging dome speakers with continuous sound showers of pink noise—also known as 1/F noise. Pink noise acts as an optimal channel for complex pro-cesses in the brain and is also the only frequency present in living and non-living systems. It is present in heartbeats, firings of single neurons as well as in electronic devices and the stock market.