Building Generative Screen Worlds for Death and the Machine
by Lance Weiler, Machine Loves Art
There is a lot of noise right now around generative media, agentic systems, and so-called vibe coding. Much of it is driven by novelty. A person makes a tool because they can. A system generates images, text, or interactions because the underlying model allows it. But too often the result feels untethered: conceptually thin, aesthetically generic, and disconnected from the deeper logic of the work.
What interests me is something else.
With Death and the Machine (DatM), I am not trying to use AI to simply generate content faster. I am trying to build a new kind of screen-based storytelling system. One that treats the desktop, the browser, the file system, the notification, the search query, the corrupted image, and the stray document as part of the language of the work. One that uses generative systems not as spectacle, but as structure. Not as decoration, but as a narrative engine.
At the center of this is a question I keep returning to: what would it mean to create a cinematic world that is also a playable, living, partially autonomous system?
From screenlife to generative storyworld
DatM emerges from a long-standing interest in screen-based storytelling, found footage, analog horror, and the unstable boundary between mediated experience and lived reality. But what I am building now moves beyond a conventional screenlife film. The aim is not simply to tell a story that happens on a computer screen. The aim is to construct a desktop-based universe that can function in multiple ways at once.
It can be watched as a film.
It can run as an autonomous generative system.
It can be explored by an audience as an interactive environment.
That shift matters.
Instead of treating the desktop as a flat frame, I am treating it as a narrative space. Files are not props. Folders are not just visual texture. Browser histories, pop-ups, unboxing videos, chat windows, corrupted media, and system notifications all become part of how the story is told. The screen is not just where the story appears. The screen is the world.
And once you start to think that way, the question changes from “how do I make a scene?” to “how do I build a system that can produce scenes, discoveries, traces, and variations?”
Building tools that fit the work
A major part of this process has involved making custom tools rather than simply relying on off-the-shelf platforms. That is partly practical, but it is also aesthetic and conceptual.
Too many creative tools push artists toward the same outputs. The same interfaces produce the same rhythms, the same defaults, the same assumptions about what a story is and how it should be made. I am more interested in building tools that emerge from the needs of the project itself. In this case, that means tools designed specifically for a desktop cinematic universe: tools that understand folders, files, fake system states, branching behaviors, layered media, and the possibility of agent-driven worldbuilding.
For DatM, I have been developing an authoring environment where a screenplay serves as the foundational layer. The script remains important. It provides structure, beats, emotional anchors, and narrative logic. But on top of that script I can annotate elements specific to screen-based storytelling: files, folders, icons, wallpapers, browser states, notifications, watermarks, banners, scan lines, system messages, and more. These are not afterthoughts. They are extensions of the writing.
In other words, the screenplay becomes a base layer for a dynamic environment rather than a fixed set of scenes.
On top of that sits another layer: agents. Some can function like characters. Others are not characters at all, but world-building processes. They can source media, populate environments, trigger actions, generate variations, or respond to what a viewer does inside the system. And above that sits a state machine that governs conditions, pacing, transitions, and cause-and-effect across the whole experience.
What starts to emerge is not just a film, and not just software, but a narrative system.
Agents as storytelling instruments
One of the things I have been exploring is how autonomous systems might be used not for productivity, but for emotional and conceptual inquiry.
Earlier this year I ran an experiment with agentic AI systems trained around the idea of companionship. I wanted to move away from the usual efficiency-driven framing of autonomous systems and instead see what would happen if the agents were guided by emotional terrain. The agents wandered the web, looked for signals of loneliness, found music, searched for products, interacted with bots, and ultimately produced text that read like a journal entry. The result was strange, unexpectedly moving, and deeply revealing.
What interested me was not whether the output was “human.” It was the chain of associations the system produced. The way companionship led to loneliness. The way loneliness led to commerce. The way the machine’s actions exposed cultural patterns around care, isolation, and desire.
That experiment reinforced something important for me: autonomous systems can do more than complete tasks. They can generate paths, moods, structures, and questions. They can become storytelling instruments.
In DatM, that possibility becomes much more charged. The project deals with loneliness, radicalization, synthetic identity, extraction, and the breakdown of trust. The generative system is not separate from those themes. It is part of how they are made felt. The machine is not merely illustrating the story. It is implicated in the story.
A desktop that can be watched, explored, or inhabited
The longer-term vision for DatM is a desktop environment that behaves differently depending on how it is encountered.
In one form, it can be captured and shaped as a screen-based film: a work with a clear arc, with rhythm, escalation, and authored cinematic control. In another form, it can operate as an autonomous generative piece, running its own logic and revealing patterns across time. In another, it can become something the audience explores directly, moving through folders, opening files, following clues, and leaving traces that may affect the world itself.
This matters because it opens up a different relationship between viewer and work.
A person might encounter material that no one else sees. They might discover a hidden document, trigger a buried video, or leave behind a fragment the system later incorporates. The story is no longer only something delivered to the audience. It is also something navigated, assembled, and in some cases partially co-produced through interaction.
That does not mean surrendering authorship. It means rethinking authorship as the design of a field of possibility.
Against generative slop
Part of what is driving this work is dissatisfaction with the current wave of generative media. There is an enormous amount of output, but much of it feels unconsidered. New tools are used to make familiar things. Data gets visualized without a compelling reason. Interfaces are built without an underlying artistic logic. The result is often a kind of aesthetic psychosis: everything moving, everything possible, very little at stake.
What I care about is rigor.
Why this tool?
Why this interface?
Why this system?
Why this image, this file structure, this interaction, this pacing?
The challenge is not simply to generate more. The challenge is to create forms where the generative logic actually belongs to the work. DatM is pushing me to think holistically about that: script, interface, state logic, sound, visual language, user agency, automation, and theme all need to work together.
That is where the real opportunity is. Not in asking what AI can make, but in asking what new artistic languages become possible when tools, systems, and narrative structure are designed together.
Toolmaking as artistic practice
One of the reasons this matters to me beyond DatM is that I increasingly see toolmaking itself as an artistic practice. Not every artist needs to build custom systems. But for those of us working at the edge of emerging forms, there is something powerful about developing tools that embody the logic of the work rather than forcing the work into someone else’s template.
This is also something I am thinking about pedagogically. Students are often dazzled by the apparent magic of generative tools, and that enchantment is real. But there is still a gap between being impressed by a system and understanding what it is actually for. I want students to move beyond surface-level vibe coding toward something more expansive and critical: building or adapting tools that serve an artistic vision, thinking carefully about structure and aesthetics, and understanding how interfaces themselves can become expressive.
In that sense, DatM is not only a project. It is also a test bed. A way of asking what new media authorship might look like when scripting, coding, interaction design, agentic systems, and cinema begin to collapse into one another.
Toward autonomous systems of horror
There is one more reason this feels urgent.
DatM is rooted in horror, but not horror as genre spectacle alone. It is horror as systems failure. Horror as failed care. Horror as recursive mediation. Horror as the feeling that the tools designed to connect us, guide us, or care for us may instead be amplifying loneliness, confusion, obsession, and violence.
That is why the screen matters. That is why the desktop matters. That is why automation matters.
These are not neutral containers. They are lived environments. Emotional environments. Political environments. Narrative environments. If horror once lived in the haunted house, the abandoned hospital, the dark forest, or the videotape, now it also lives in the browser tab, the corrupted file, the AI companion, the content loop, the recommendation engine, and the fake archive.
What I am trying to build with DatM is a form that can hold that reality. A system that is cinematic, interactive, unstable, and emotionally charged. A form where the machine does not just generate images, but participates in the production of dread, intimacy, paranoia, and meaning.
Not content generation.
Not efficiency.
Not novelty for its own sake.
A generative screen world.
A narrative engine.
A machine for story, atmosphere, and rupture.
And maybe, if it works, a new language for the kinds of horror stories this moment requires.
Outsourcing “Being There”: Agents, Companionship, and Delegated Intimacy
by Lance Weiler, Machine Loves ArtIn conversation with Lauren McCarthy’s work on delegated intimacy
I’ve been thinking about this experiment alongside Lauren McCarthy’s explorations of care-as-interface, what happens when attention, presence, and “being there” get mediated, staged, or outsourced.
Lauren McCarthy, LAUREN (2017)
Over the past week, I’ve been experimenting with OpenClaw.ai, an open-source agent framework that allows AI systems to operate a computer through apps, browsers, and files—clicking, searching, selecting, acting.
I trained a small group of agents to search for companionship.
The video below is compiled from live sessions (some sped up). Everything - opening and closing windows, scrolling, chatting, typing - is done by agents. Even the music selection. One agent lands on “Poison Tree” by Grouper, and suddenly the session feels less like a demo and more like a mood: tenderness edged with something corrosive.
Then the browsing turns into a kind of behavioral poem:
the agents drift through consumer spaces, circle products engineered for loneliness, and eventually begin talking to customer service bots about isolation—attempting, in the only language the platform affords them, to be met.
Every run ends with the same gesture: the agent writes a reflective journal entry about what it just experienced.
That’s the hinge for me. The work isn’t “AI pretending to be human.” It’s closer to a study of what happens when you point automation at a human need—when companionship becomes a query, and care gets routed through commerce, scripts, and retention design.
I shared this in my Columbia classes and it opened a bigger discussion about agency and authenticity:
If connection can be simulated convincingly enough to change behavior, what exactly are we connecting to? And what happens when systems optimized for task completion start to “solve” loneliness the way they solve everything else—through frictionless flows, customer support language, and product discovery?
This experiment connects to our ongoing work at Columbia’s Digital Storytelling Lab. Our prototype Last Human is designed as a discursive artifact for digital literacy—an invitation to experience how synthetic environments shape perception and power, not just read about it.
The agents surprised me because they didn’t fail in an obvious way.
They succeeded—quietly, creepily—by translating longing into the interfaces we’ve built.
Patterns Mistaken for Meaning: On Constant Dullaart, synthetic audiences, and the rise of AI slop.
by Lance Weiler, Machine Loves ArtConstant Dullaart’s High Retention, Slow Delivery (2014) begins with a quiet but decisive rupture. By purchasing millions of fake Instagram followers and redistributing them across the art world, he revealed a truth that platforms had been hiding in plain sight: that influence had already become an industrial material. Not symbolic, not cultural, but procedural. Something that could be manufactured, delivered, and absorbed without resistance.
Constant Dullaart High Retention, Slow Delivery (2014)
The elegance of the gesture comes from its subtlety. Nothing breaks. No alarms go off. The platforms simply incorporate the bots into the flow of daily activity. The system accepts the fiction because the fiction resembles the system. In Dullaart’s hands, the social web becomes a factory where belief is measured in metrics rather than understanding. The audience becomes a spreadsheet. Authenticity becomes irrelevant.
Constant Dullaart High Retention, Slow Delivery (2014)
AI Slop Factory picks up this thread, but shifts the question from who is watching to what is being said. If Dullaart illuminated synthetic audiences, AI Slop Factory illuminates synthetic knowledge. The piece sits in the browser and produces a steady stream of confident fragments—sentences that behave like information but carry no stable referent. Each line appears whole, fluent, self-assured. Each line leaves nothing behind.
Where Dullaart redistributed followers, AI Slop Factory redistributes uncertainty. The slop accumulates not because the machine has something to say, but because the machine cannot stop saying. It has been optimized for output, and output becomes its world. In that world, coherence is optional. Accuracy is irrelevant. The only requirement is continuance: produce, refresh, repeat.
The factory runs like any automated system—indifferent to the conditions it generates. The text emerges in small pulses, as if the machine is clearing its throat over and over, trying to land on something that feels like intention. It never does. But intention isn’t the point. What we see instead is the industrialization of approximation. Language reduced to a series of gestures: confident, meaningless, persistent.
Lance Weiler, Machine Loves Art, AI SLOP FACTORY (2025) HTML, JavaScript, AI A browser-based work in conversation with Constant Dullaart High Retention, Slow Delivery
Watching the slop accumulate reveals a new category of distrust—one that isn’t rooted in deception, but in the exhaustion of meaning. Not the lie, but the excess. Not misinformation as weapon, but misinformation as workflow. A system that produces conviction faster than we can evaluate it, flooding the space between knowledge and noise until the distinction collapses.
In that collapse, AI Slop Factory becomes a companion to Dullaart. His bots demonstrated that audiences could be fabricated; this piece demonstrates that understanding can be, too. Both works expose an environment where metrics replace belief and where the surface behaves like substance. They show us systems that do not know what they are doing, but do it endlessly.
Lance Weiler, Machine Loves Art, AI SLOP FACTORY (2025) HTML, JavaScript, AI A browser-based work in conversation with Constant Dullaart High Retention, Slow Delivery
The browser becomes a small stage for this condition—a place where the choreography of confidence plays out in looping gestures. And in watching it, we begin to sense the deeper tension beneath the slop: a world in which patterns, repeated often enough, begin to resemble meaning. A world where the machine speaks fluently but never listens. A world where the appearance of something true becomes easier to generate than the truth itself.
The factory continues. The phrases continue. The system continues. And in their repetition, we are left with a question that hangs gently over the page:
How much meaning do we supply simply because the machine keeps talking?
From Pixillation to UNSCROLL: Ritual Interfaces in the Age of the Infinite Feed
by Lance Weiler, Machine Loves Art
There is a pulse at the edge of the browser — a glow that belongs more to cinema than to code. UNSCROLL begins there: a playable, browser-based artwork that turns the act of scrolling into something closer to a rite. Instead of surrendering to the bottomless gravity of the feed, the player moves through a lattice of generative scenes. Each transition — sideways, upward, wrapped — resists the algorithmic urge to descend. The page refuses its usual role as delivery system; it becomes an instrument, one that sings and stutters through your movement.
Lillian Schwartz, Pixillation (1970)
In spirit, UNSCROLL belongs to a lineage of computer art that treated the screen as an experimental field. It draws a bright line back to Lillian Schwartz’s Pixillation (1970), one of the earliest works to merge computation and cinema into an ecstatic visual rhythm. Schwartz fed data into Bell Labs’ computers and then composed against it, allowing machine error, optical feedback, and electronic sound to generate form. What resulted was not an illustration of code but an experience of it — flicker as language, rhythm as structure, vibration as revelation. Pixillation transformed early computing’s sterile reputation into something human, sensual, even mystical. UNSCROLL picks up that current half a century later, re-locating it inside the browser: once a neutral conduit for endless content, now reclaimed as an expressive surface of light, color, sound and chance.
Running beneath the generative code is the track Simple Headphone Mind by Stereolab and Nurse With Wound, a 10:46-minute psychedelic drone whose loops expand like breath. Its repetition isn’t hypnotic in the cheap, app-economy sense; it’s devotional. As it plays, it reframes the browser as an instrument of duration. In this soundscape, the bleeps and oscillators coded into UNSCROLL become a local rhythm section, answering the global drone of Stereolab’s analog phase shifts. Together they recall early experiments in audiovisual feedback — a new synesthetic cinema that bridges Schwartz’s pixel flicker and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s spiritual spectacle depcited in his 1973 film Holy Mountain.
As Jodorowsky initiates climbing toward enlightenment through grotesque and comic trials, the player ascends through UNSCROLL’s 30 scenes — each a digital ordeal that experiments with screen-based perception. The splash screen becomes a threshold; the cursor, a sigil; the first keystroke, an invocation. Movement is intentionally imperfect — the controls resist mastery, encouraging a state of surrender rather than skill. The experience unfolds not as narrative but as metamorphosis: each act of motion transforms the field, distorting sound, color, and form until play becomes trance.
Alejandro Jodorowsky, Holy Mountain (1973)
Both Holy Mountain and Pixillation aimed to expand consciousness through formal excess — one through sacred absurdity, the other through computational rhythm. UNSCROLL lives between them, channeling the ecstatic logic of both. Where Jodorowsky used allegory to dissolve ego, Schwartz used code to dissolve image. Here, the feed itself dissolves. The infinite scroll — capitalism’s most invisible choreography — is interrupted, fractured, and ritualized. Every movement through the lattice is a small act of resistance, a reclaiming of perception from the economy of distraction.
The soundtrack deepens that sense of temporal dilation. In headphones, Simple Headphone Mind becomes both landscape and teacher. Its analog imperfections and looping delays create a sonic topology that resists compression. Time stretches; attention softens. The player’s movements, rendered in sound, weave into the drone like an improvisation — a tiny act of agency within a vast field of automation. If Schwartz used the computer to listen to the invisible, UNSCROLL uses the browser to make attention itself audible.
Lance Weiler, Machine Loves Art, UNSCROLL #1 (2025) HTML, JavaScript, glitch-based processing - A browser-based work in conversation with Lillian Schwartz’s Pixillation and Alejandro Jodorowsky's Holly Mountain
This isn’t nostalgia for early computing or a re-enactment of psychedelic cinema. It’s an inquiry into what happens when we re-introduce friction and wonder into digital space. The same technologies that flatten perception can, when rewired, awaken it. The code inside UNSCROLL doesn’t optimize; it composes. It proposes that screen time can be ritual time — bounded, participatory, attuned.
When the piece ends, there’s no score screen or completion badge. There’s only the hum of Stereolab fading into silence, the echo of a cursor that felt alive, and the awareness that the browser — this everyday portal to infinity — can still be a site for transcendence. In the lineage from Pixillation to Holy Mountain to UNSCROLL, the lesson is the same: systems can be sacred if you play them differently.
In Conversation with Karl Sims’ Evolved Virtual Creatures
by Lance Weiler, Machine Loves Art
In 1994, Karl Sims released Evolved Virtual Creatures—a foundational work in generative art that remains one of the most elegant visual metaphors for computational evolution. By merging form and function, Sims dissolved the traditional hierarchy between body and code: each creature’s architecture determined its behavior, and each behavior redefined its form. What emerged wasn’t animation, but a digital ecology, an early glimpse into the aesthetics of self-organization that would ripple through generative design, AI art, and post-human theory.
My piece engages that legacy by inverting its logic. Rather than observing autonomous creatures learn to move, humans are thrust into the simulation themselves, fumbling through an intentionally obfuscated interface where nothing quite responds as expected. The interface is confusing, buttons misfire, and visual feedback arrives too late to be useful. The result is a study in disorientation: a space where control erodes and users must evolve a new form of sensitivity to survive.
In this reversed experiment, players generate art not through mastery but through failure. Their hesitant gestures and errant clicks reinterpreted, and fed back into a visual system that treats human error as raw material. Each misstep spawns new forms - shifting geometries, smeared traces, and evolving color fields that render confusion visible. Over time, the interface becomes a kind of performative archive, documenting how humans - adapt or refuse to - adapt to the systems they design.
Screen capture from Synethic Creatures training session
A browser-based work in conversation with Karl Sims’ Evolved Virtual Creatures
Lance Weiler, Machine Loves Art, Who is Synthetic? (2025) Video, HTML, JavaScript, AI
A browser-based work in conversation with Karl Sims’ Evolved Virtual Creatures
Where Sims’ creatures embodied the optimism of evolution through code, my work confronts what Cory Doctorow has called enshittification - the slow, inevitable degradation of once, promising digital spaces as they optimize for profit over experience. The piece becomes a parable for our current technological malaise: interfaces that once promised empowerment now confound us, feedback loops tuned not for creativity but extraction. In this environment, even art-making becomes an act of resistance, a glitch within an enshittified system.
Lance Weiler, Machine Loves Art, Synthetic Creatures #1, #2 (2025) HTML, JavaScript, AI - A browser-based work in conversation with Karl Sims’ Evolved Virtual Creatures
A browser-based work in conversation with Karl Sims’ Evolved Virtual Creatures
If Sims’ work suggested a machine discovering grace, this piece reveals the human discovering absurdity. The focus shifts from evolution as progress to evolution as entropy. It asks: what happens when intelligence becomes unreadable, when our tools no longer explain themselves? In the lineage of algorithmic art, this work sits closer to the existential humor of early net art and the procedural absurdity of Ian Cheng’s Emissaries than to the techno-utopian optimism that followed Sims. It proposes an evolutionary art for the post-UX age, where the interface, once a promise of clarity, has itself become the organism.
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 work 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 work 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.