In “Just in case,” Thierry Fournier addresses the perception of digital systems as an Other by reversing the relationship between human and machine. Borrowing from the experience of solving captchas, the work sets up a fictional situation where it’s considered normal for a machine to detect whether or not someone is human all by itself.
In the piece, the screen shows a message that seems to come from a computer program that wonders if the person who observes it is human (“checking you are human…”). It hesitates, calculates, and a wheel turns. Finally, it stops and displays a brief “thank you.” Then it starts again, ad infinitum. A brief moment of doubt arises while the process runs, which is lifted when the animation starts again—only to open up more questions.
As an animated GIF, this edition can be easily distributed via social media posts, messages, emails, and any other form of digital communication. In those spaces, it can be experienced outside of an artistic context as a way to hint at humans’ dystopian relationship with machines, or to question how to define what being human is.
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