Humanum Unknown Error

Alan Turing laid the philosophical-mathematical foundations of the golem that was to become part of our lives. Out of profound understanding of the implications of the machine he had created, he also conceived the Turing Test - a kind of humanity meter that assesses the degree of similarity between man and machine.

There are still no computers that are able to pass the Turing Test, but in recent years a Reverse Turing Test has been devised. This test, now administered by a machine and targeted at a human, allows computers to determine whether the entities facing them are flesh and blood. We have all seen it in the form of CAPTCHAs - those twisted alpha-numeric symbols decipherable only by the human brain, and therefore non-accessible to machines.

These actually embody a human readable only language, as opposed to the machine readable only languages we are so familiar with, i.e. barcodes and QR squares. Both languages have emerged out of digital reality, and are mutually exclusive. Machine language remains unreadable to the human eye, and Captchas are undecipherable by the machine brain. Thus, they effectively distinguish between man and machine.

In this work, Tsila Hassine ("misstate") liberates the CAPTCHA from its digital administrators, and turns it into a tool helping people determine whether the entities they are facing are human or virtual, and address them directly, without digital mediation, but with digital assistance. Thanks to the separation enabled by the two mutually exclusive languages, the machine becomes once more a tool, rather than a communication interface. The visitors will be able to prepare their own erasable tattoos, with coded messages designed exclusively for either humans or non-humans. What happens when you try to combine those two exclusive languages? Is there some entity that would be able to decipher this new, hybrid language? Can we attempt to envision such an entity based on a hybridized form of those languages?