Online version: animated gif (7″), square format, 2015
Installation version: video (12h, 1080p, 16/9, no sound), USB key, LCD screen, steel stand, 170 x 75 x 75 cm, 2017
A screen wonders if the person who observes it is human (“checking you are human….”). It hesitates, it calculates, a wheel turns. Finally, it stops and thanks. Then it starts again, ad infinitum.
Borrowing the language of the captchas, « Just in case » sets up a fictional situation where an apparatus would have become legitimate to detect alone who would be human or not. For a very brief moment, we may think that the screen is actually observing us – besides, does it compute when we are not there? For this entity repeats indefinitely its process, we quickly understand that it plays alone. So, after considering for a brief moment the dystopian hypothesis that a machine could become legitimate to evaluate us, one can continue to watch it, as the uncanny spectacle of an autonomous life form.
