WELCOME TO THE MASKARADY PROJECT
Opening: July 4, 2025, at 7:00 PM
Artist: Lidia Krawczyk
Curatorial collaboration: Adriana Markowska
Spatial design: Marta Dymitrowska
Producer: Lucyna Shefter
Lidia Krawczyk’s project breaks the illusion of technological innocence and reveals how the digital gaze turns the body into a pattern, emotion into a label, and a human into a prediction. It is a story about how our virtual images – the everyday, repetitive, seemingly innocent ones – become fuel for systems of surveillance, commerce, and classification.
The artist employs generative artificial intelligence — including text-to-image models, facial recognition engines, and databases such as LAION or ImageNet — not to create with it, but to expose the ways in which it produces a mirror image of our reality.
We are guided through digital documentation of choreographies collected in a virtual cloud of data dedicated to culturally typical female figures like the model or the mother (Falling, Dark Mother), where we observe patterns to be learned: how to pose according to prevailing standards, what to do to earn recognition and praise in the form of more subscribers, likes, and comments. Where the body must be arranged to highlight its assets and conceal evidence of being a living organism — one that eats, sleeps, works, gets sick, is tired, and gives up. To be visible, one must practice the rituals of social media, sticking to tried-and-tested methods of success. We bend ourselves to the rules of visibility, turning our bodies into deformed, submissive shapes.
These exaggerated figures lead us to another stop on the virtual social carousel, where we are transformed into cookie-pixels (Digital Figures (Google) or Pixelated Cookies). The more pixels gathered, the more complete and clearer the overall image becomes — and thus more valuable for tech companies — reducing us to noisy, identity-less figures. In this digital web, we function as avatars sold at fast-paced online auctions, where our attention is priced at forty to sixty cents per click.
These silicone beings of the future, designed according to statistical probabilities and emotions tailored to the average human avatar, overwhelm with their sheer volume. From here, it is just a step to what is artificial. We enter a world of simulation and statistics — both fundamental and phenomenal forces in the digital architecture used to define and monitor the individual. This is the realm where a game of emotional naturalness is played, where mathematics eliminates the diversity, uniqueness, and abstraction of our identities. Multiplicity is turned into unity, modifying complexity into orderly geometry. Projects such as Womanhood, the calculated How to Be Seen, and the awkward rich lazy happy sad anxious poor beautiful man address extreme affects that male scientists (e.g., Paul Ekman, Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne, or Jean-Martin Charcot) sought — with considerable success — to tame and archive, subjecting them to control through textual and visual capture. Facial and emotion recognition systems are in constant use — neutralized and rationalized. Machine vision is presented to us as reliable and essential for our safety. Yet its foundations — effectiveness and accuracy in definition — are rotten.
Lidia Krawczyk’s exhibition reveals the mechanisms of this digital power hidden beneath the masks of interfaces, selfies, and recommendation algorithms. For her, machine learning is not a neutral tool, nor is generative artificial intelligence a magical invention. Instead, she presents a reality woven from distorted mirrors, where algorithms are political actors that process human images, emotions, and identities into data sets, primitive simulations, and crude predictions.
The exhibition is a public presentation of Lidia Krawczyk’s PhD project “Maskarady” carried out at the Doctoral School of the University of the Commission of National Education in Kraków.
Supervisor: Dr. hab. Małgorzata Niespodziewana-Rados, Prof. UKEN
Assistant Supervisor: Dr. Małgorzata Markiewicz
