Please Verify Your Humanity is a web-based installation repurposing reCAPTCHAs to visualize human chaos, haphazardness, inefficiency, curiosity, and improvisation.
In September 2009, Google acquired reCAPTCHA technology, a public Turing test to discern whether or not a digital user is a human or a bot. In 2018, Google released reCAPTCHA v3 and â sinister implications very much in place (data privacy breaches! A classic tale in the digital postmodern era) â it waved its fairy godmother wand and did away with the tedious tasks introduced in v2, like determining how many bikes are in the image. Nicknamed âinvisible CAPTCHAâ or even ânoCAPTCHAâ, v3 does so primarily by collecting the data form and analyzing 1) the userâs browser history and other web interactions and 2) the userâs mouse movement as they go to check the âI am a humanâ box. The key distinguishing factor between a bot and a human is the haphazardness of the human userâs search history, which often jumps from incomplete thought to irrelevant subject, as well as a meandering mouse pathway. A botâs movements are straight, unbroken, linear lines with maximum accuracy and efficiency and its web interactions have the kind of haunting precision that you would expect from, well, a robot. In stark contrast, the human pathway tends to move in nonlinear beelines, apparently stopping to smell the 8-bit flowers.
In a way it feels a bit ironic, and in another, it is perfectly logical that the machines weâve built to maximize our speciesâ efficiency are now characterizing and differentiating us from them by that lack (logical because if we werenât so terribly inefficient, we would not have had a need for the algorithms weâve built). This is how we verify our humanity â through our sporadic, unproductive, nonlinear behaviors. In other words, humanness, as distinguishable from the robots weâve built to overcome this exact trait, is characterized by chaos, haphazardness, curiosity, and improvisation.
GRACE KIM is a New York and Seoul-based director and artist. She has directed narrative films, branded content, and music videos for clients such as Epitaph Records, Seoul Fashion Week, and McDonaldâs, to name a few. Her directorial work possesses a wide spectrum, characterized by whimsy and playfulness on one end, and sharp and ship on the other and have screened nationwide at films festivals such as the Hamptons International Film Festival and venues such as the Museum of the Moving Image, Syndicated Theater, Firehouse Cinema, Stuart Cinema, and the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Airport. Her work has been supported by the Atlanta Film Society for the Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, NYC Women’s Fund, administered by the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment and New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Local Arts Fund administered by the Brooklyn Arts Council. She is a ViacomCBS Viewfinder Emerging Director Fellow.
As an artist, she works primarily with moving image and installation and is particularly interested in the blurring lines between representation(image) and the represented (subject), the feedback loop of consent, consumption, and power between the two, particularly within a Baudrillardian context. She has exhibited in Brooklyn, NY and held residency with the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts and is currently in residence at Art Korea Lab in Seoul, South Korea.
