In an age where algorithms curate what we see, AI can generate images in seconds, and technology is already taking over our daily routines, Khoj’s new international exhibition ‘Are You Human?: Bodies–Machines–Publics’ asks how much of our lives are still truly ours.
Opened on January 30 at Khoj Studios, the show brings together artists from India, Taiwan, Austria, Australia, Japan, Portugal, Germany and the UK to explore the blurred boundaries between bodies and machines; the last day to catch the show is today.
The exhibition features installations, AI-driven systems, animation screenings and public workshops, where the artists examine how technology influences art, identity, labour and even democracy itself. Here’s what caught our eye:
The digital scam
Taiwan-based collective Simple Noodle Art’s project is presenting an AI interactive video installation, ‘Exploration and Exploitation’. The work revolves around an office worker watching a YouTube video about an AI virtual companion. Using an emotion-detection system, the installation shifts the YouTuber’s stance — to positive, neutral or negative — based on the viewer’s facial reactions. The ‘exploration’ is suddenly turned into ‘exploitation’, when recommendation algorithms start feeding users more of what aligns with their perceived preferences.
The artists note that during the exhibition, some visitors even tried to “hack” the system by deliberately changing their expressions to manipulate the narrative direction. The act, therefore, also reveals how fragile algorithmic assumptions can be. However, they also point to real-world examples — such as social media platforms amplifying extreme content — that show how easily users slip into filter bubbles without realising it.
How targeted advertising works
On the other hand, ‘We, The Market Segments’ by artists Manuel Beltrán and Nayantara Ranganathan centres around targeted political advertisements in India.
It is a large-scale installation composed of face cutouts sourced from online advertisements on Meta platforms such as Instagram and Facebook. It focuses on a senior citizen receiving a free eye check-up, the disgruntled housewife worried about rising grocery prices, the daily wage labourer uplifted by an employment guarantee scheme, the schoolchildren surviving a heatwave, among many others. The fragments form a pattern in how the common man is interpreted and addressed in socio-political and economic scenarios.
The installation also questions how targeted advertising works in ways that are hard to fully see or understand. As Beltrán says, “It becomes very difficult to diagnose something that is almost impossible to see in its full scale or that deliberately prevents visibility into how it works. In the installation we also highlight how the advertisements widely function over emotional resonance rather than contestable claims, which indeed impacts the way we identify and interact with them.”
Originality matters
On the other hand, ‘We Don’t Need Artists’ by Leewardists — a storytelling and communication design studio partnered by architects and urban designers Anuj Kale and Shreya Khandelkar — is a comic panel debating around the realities of Artificial Intelligence (AI). It follows the journey of an artist, Shanti, as she comes to recognise the efforts and value of emotions that go into creating an original work of art.
The other projects featured at ‘Are We Humans’, include a satirical music video addressing digital scams — ‘Pooja Is Calling’ by mixed media artist Hasan Shahrukh; a virtual reality experience of the Daintree rainforests, by Australian artists Ben Andrews and Emma Roberts, inspired from their five-months stay in the place; Swarna Manjari’s twin zines on the rapidly developing internet, among other artworks.
As the visitors walk through the space, lingering thought in everybody’s minds — the extent of technology influencing our every move, how we see, feel, and relate to one another – and what we have gained or lost in the process, and what we can do to push back.