Human/Machine Criticism in the Age of Perpetual Capture
by Lance Weiler, Machine Loves Art
John Baldessari, Man Falling Down, 2003. © John Baldessari Estate. Image reproduced for critical commentary.
What happens when an image refuses stability? In John Baldessari’s Man Falling Down (2003), a body - rendered in flat orange, an absence as much as a presence - topples headfirst into a stairwell. The fall is perpetual. We never see impact. Gravity becomes an aesthetic condition.
Baldessari built his career by cutting, collaging, and recontextualizing. Here, he uses the silhouette of a man in freefall to fracture the logic of the photograph beneath it. The scene is domestic: a woman reclines on a couch, surrounded by patterned curtains and familiar décor. But the intrusion of the falling figure - clumsy, violent, cartoonish - interrupts whatever narrative the original photograph may have contained. The body is both anonymous and universal. It could be anyone. It could be us.
Lance Weiler, Machine Loves Art, Hierarchies of Seeing (2025)
When I ask an LLM to describe the art by only using the results of a computer-vision scan, it highlights the shape of things:
“The orange silhouette is in stark contrast to the grayscale background. The gesture of falling is inverted. The fall is perpetual. We never see impact. Gravity becomes an aesthetic condition.”
What strikes me in the machine’s response is how it recognizes form before narrative. Where I want to read story, Who is falling? Why?, the model insists on surface and syntax. For it, the meaning is in contrast, cut-out, inversion. Perhaps Baldessari anticipated this kind of mechanical gaze: an art of substitution and subtraction, ripe for algorithmic attention.
Baldessari was always playing with the collision of high and low, the absurd and the serious. Man Falling Down is slapstick tragedy. It invokes Buster Keaton’s pratfalls, the endless loops of action cinema, the freeze-frames of comic books. Yet it also feels like a meditation on failure itself - on the inevitability of collapse.
In 2003, this might have been read as commentary on media saturation. In 2025, the silhouette feels uncannily like a dataset annotation: a bounding-box gone rogue, a human figure reduced to training data. Baldessari’s collage becomes prophetic - anticipating the ways machines now parse human form.
This article is an experiment: a human and a machine in dialogue, trying to see differently together. Baldessari’s Man Falling Down makes the collaboration feel fitting. The human eye chases meaning in the absurd fall. The machine eye sees only contour, cut, color. Between the two, perhaps, lies a new way of looking.
Lance Weiler, Machine Loves Art, Perpetual Fall (2025) HTML/CSS, JavaScript
A browser-based loop in conversation with John Baldessari’s Man Falling Down
Baldessari’s Man Falling Down shows us a body suspended in collapse — a fall that never lands. Perpetual Fall translates that gesture into code. The player falls endlessly through a virtual stairwell, as they strike obstacles they break apart into fragments in free fall. You can drift, dodge, brace, but only one law holds: motion without end, collapse without resolution.
Baldessari’s Man Falling Down captures a body suspended in collapse, a fall without landing. Perpetual Fall translates that gesture into code: the player plummets endlessly through a virtual stairwell, shattering into fragments with every collision. You can drift, dodge, brace, but one law endures: motion without end, collapse without resolution.
Where Baldessari used collage to fracture the photograph, the game fractures recognition itself. The machine insists: object: person (p=0.67), impact not detected. The pratfall becomes algorithmic, logged as probabilities rather than stories. Like Baldessari’s orange cut-out, the player is both absence and presence, comedy and tragedy, dataset and body.
The joke and the insight is that we are always falling, and the machine can never quite catch us.
In 1979, Sophie Calle turned her bed into an exhibition site. For eight days, twenty-eight people — friends, acquaintances, strangers — took turns sleeping in her apartment, each occupying an eight-hour shift. Calle documented them with photographs and meticulous notes: when they arrived, how they slept, how they stirred. The work is at once intimate and clinical, a diary written through the unconscious bodies of others.
Sophie Calle, The Sleepers, 1979. © Sophie Calle. Image reproduced for critical commentary.
The photographs hover between tenderness and intrusion. To sleep in another’s bed is an act of vulnerability; to be photographed there is to have that vulnerability archived. Calle makes the private act of rest into something shared, consumed, transformed. In this way, The Sleepers becomes a study in boundaries of trust, voyeurism, and the uneasy exchange between artist and subject.
What the machine sees
“The system detects a person lying on a bed, with a face partially obscured by a sleep mask. The background is primarily flat grayscale tones (wall/pillow), while the foreground has stronger texture (hair, fabric folds). Detection confidence is moderate due to occlusion and lighting, but the overall figure is registered as person (p=0.91).”
Lance Weiler, Machine Loves Art, Machine Logs Sleep (2025) computer vision, glitch processing
The machine sees only surfaces: a body horizontal, without eyes, the architecture of sleep. It parses the scene as a dataset of positions and probabilities. But the AI’s flat recognition underscores what Calle makes visible: the impossibility of reducing sleep to data. What matters here is not just the body in repose, but the trust extended, and the trespass enacted, when observation becomes art.
At its core, The Sleepers is a work about access - about who is permitted to witness and what happens when the most private moments are rendered public. Calle transforms the bed, an emblem of intimacy, into a stage, collapsing the distinction between hospitality and surveillance. Her documentation is rigorous, even clinical, but what emerges is not neutrality but instead a portrait of desire, power, and complicity.
The piece anticipates the conditions of contemporary life, where the most mundane acts, sleeping, eating, scrolling, are continuously logged, monitored, and archived. What Calle staged as an experiment in the late 1970s foreshadows the logic of the quantified self and the era of biometric tracking. Yet unlike machines, Calle’s gaze is never purely functional; it is charged with curiosity, obsession, even tenderness. The Sleepers makes visible the entanglement of care and control, showing how surveillance is not only about capture but also about intimacy.
The Sleepers is emblematic of Calle’s practice: she choreographs situations where intimacy and surveillance collapse into each other. Seen through the lens of machine vision, the work feels prophetic, anticipating today’s algorithmic gaze — a gaze that watches without sleeping. Calle’s sleepers are no longer just participants; they are training data for futures she could not yet see.
SPACE BAR or TAP to PLAY
Lance Weiler, Machine Loves Art, Eyes Closed, System Open (2025) HTML/CSS, JavaScript
A browser-based experiment in conversation with Sophie Calle’s The Sleepers
Sophie Calle’s The Sleepers asked friends and strangers to lie in her bed while she documented them with notes and photographs. Intimacy became exhibition, trust became material. Eyes Closed, System Open translates that logic into a digital stage: to play is to close your eyes, to do nothing while the machine watches.
What emerges is less game than surveillance ritual. Your stillness is parsed into labels — object: sleeper (p=0.91), state: unconscious. Every stir is logged as an anomaly, every moment of rest archived as data. Vulnerability becomes quantifiable, a probability score.
Like Calle’s piece, the work oscillates between tenderness and trespass. To “sleep” here is to surrender control, but also to feel the absurd flatness of the machine’s gaze. In “playing,” you inhabit the same unease Calle revealed: how easily intimacy can be turned into record, how rest itself can be consumed.
Afterimages
Baldessari leaves us suspended in the instant before impact; Calle invites us to watch others dream.Between the endless fall and the endless sleep, a single question lingers: who is allowed to look, and who pays the price of being seen?
The machine answers with coordinates and probabilities, confident in its neutrality.
But its gaze is built on hidden hierarchies—training sets scraped from unequal worlds, annotation labor bought for pennies, biases encoded as mathematics.
The orange silhouette and the resting bodies become stand-ins for all of us: figures flattened into data, gestures reduced to labels.
What these works reveal, decades apart, is that technology’s promise of perfect vision is also a rehearsal for forgetting.
Baldessari’s fall never lands; Calle’s sleepers never wake.
The machine watches without end, yet never truly witnesses.
To engage with these images now is to recognize that our own lives are moving toward the same asymptote: ceaseless capture without understanding.
In that gap, between surface and meaning, between record and recognition, criticism itself must remain restless, refusing the machine’s easy certainty, keeping the fall and the dream alive.