Avital Meshi: Subverting the Algorithmic Gaze

About the Exhibition

Technology is everywhere – and so is our data. Today, we rely extensively on technology, especially in the wake of an unsettling pandemic that enables people to safely connect primarily via technological platforms. However, our smart devices – which we treat as extensions of ourselves and entrust to carry and store our most sensitive information – also gather data that government agencies and commercial entities can purchase, monitor, and evaluate without our knowledge. Technology not only introduced new means of social, economic, and political interactions, it also introduced pernicious modes of surveillance that raise an ever-evolving set of moral questions about its relationship to race, privacy, and interpersonal and human-machine relationships.

Avital Meshi explores such human-machine relationships in her performative practice. This online solo exhibition, which was on view from March 28 – June 21, 2022, presented four recent projects by Meshi, which invited audience members to think critically about their relationship with technology and how technology can play a role in constructing identity. In The New Vitruvian (2022), Meshi, armed only with a chair, challenges the accuracy of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. The algorithm struggles to identify Meshi as she moves with the chair. It identifies her as a woman and then misidentifies her as a horse, a kite, a refrigerator, and a chair, among other inanimate objects. In ZEN A.I. (2021), a collaborative project with transdisciplinary performer Treyden Chiaravalloti, Meshi transforms the ritual of meditation – a private reprieve from the outside world – into a thought-provoking endurance performance. This unsettling meditation is led by an AI algorithm that instructs her “mindfulness” practice while another AI algorithm monitors the artist and her surroundings. In Techno-Schizo (2020), Meshi employs her body to reveal how humans can resist flawed and racist algorithms. Her performance visualizes the impact and potential dangers of AI systems that government and commercial agencies secretly operate for surveillance and marketing purposes. Meshi’s performance implies that people can reclaim their agency and maintain complex identities in the face of the overly simplified and flawed labeling system imposed by AI algorithms.

The artist and curators invited willing audience members to join the performance by participating in an interactive session of The AI Human-Training Center (2020-ongoing), allowing participants to engage with the same algorithms Meshi uses in her work. Documentation from these performances is archived on the exhibition website.

This exhibition was curated by Goldie Gross, Alejandra López-Oliveros, and Janelle Miniter. Jason Varone designed the website and Professors Edward J. Sullivan and Christine Poggi provided faculty support. This exhibition was made possible through the generous support of Valeria Napoleone XX.