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I’m not a robot

2023

Emma Sokoll
I’m not a robot
2023

I’m not a robot explores CAPTCHA* as a contemporary Turing test in which the balance between human and machine perception is continuously renegotiated. Originally designed to distinguish humans from automated systems, CAPTCHA increasingly reveals a reversal of roles as artificial intelligence surpasses human accuracy in identifying fragmented, low-resolution, and ambiguous images. What was once a test for machines becomes a test that humans fail with growing frequency, prompting a ping-pong-like back-and-forth of ever new CAPTCHA iterations.

The work responds to this shift by reframing CAPTCHA as a space for human intuition. It consists of three interactive photographic CAPTCHA grids titled love, magic, and sleep. Each grid is composed of nine photographs arranged in a three-by-three matrix, mirroring the visual logic of online CAPTCHA interfaces. The images were produced in locations personally associated with each term.

Visitors are invited to move the photographic tiles freely between the three CAPTCHA categories and assemble their own configurations based on association rather than rule-based recognition. In doing so, the work proposes a CAPTCHA that cannot be solved through pattern recognition or efficiency, but instead through affect, interpretation, and personal meaning. The three selected terms reference states or concepts that artificial intelligence does not need to experience and cannot inhabit.
The interaction concludes with a physical “I’m not a robot” checkbox printed on paper, which visitors may mark using a green pen and tear from a paper block to take with them. This act requires a body and a physical presence.

Following its presentation at UdK Rundgang 2023, visitors began leaving behind modified and annotated checkboxes, including altered text, drawings, and playful reinterpretations of the statement “I’m not a robot.” These interventions are documented as part of the work.

*CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart

Exhibited at UdK Rundgang 2023.