Oculus Machina is an act of demistification of artificial intelligence technology, presenting a critical point of view paired with a satirical and provocative staging. A face recognition and profiling algorithm becomes a virtual fortune-teller, promising to read accurately into the past, present and future of the analyzed face and generating prophecies not based on astrology or occult practices, but on pure mathematical deduction.

Since the AI boom, this technology seems to have become the answer to all our questions, the simplest and most convenient solution to our most complex and divisive problems. AI is surrounded by an aura of mysticism and obscurity that’s hard to cleave, a black box whose logic is incomprehensible for a mere human brain. This leads us to rely on it without really questioning its validity, treating it as a being of immeasurable power, capable of either guiding us towards a utopia or triggering the apocalypse, a digital oracle of absolute truth and justice. Thanks to this technology, it’s not so absurd, after all, recognizing someone’s deeper feelings or identifying their sexual orientation just by letting a computer look at a grainy picture of their face, or predicting who will commit a crime based on the way they walk, or again, making crucial military decisions on the battlefield, with hundreds of human lives on the line.

Often these implementations are pursued not because it’s reasonable to think that there may be any correlation between somatic features and homosexuality or criminal tendencies for example, but because this is what is technically possible with machine learning. The ability to automate measurements like skin color, eye distance, cranial size… (which a computer can extract quickly and conveniently from a CCTV feed), stimulates the desire to find meaning in these approaches, even without any scientific proof, to then legitimise their validity on the AI superiority. (Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI, 2021)