candids

These compositions appear abstract at first glance, yet they retain a subtle fidelity to the captured moment. The colour of each line is not an aesthetic choice, but directly derived from the original pixels of the video footage – preserving a kind of visual DNA: the shade of clothing, the hue of a wall, the tone of ambient light. What emerges is a form of portraiture not rooted in appearance, but in dynamics – an account of being in space, in time, in one’s own home.

In contrast to Julian’s earlier work with surveillance footage – such as Surveillance Studies (2014), which algorithmically extracted public movement from short videos – Candids inverts the direction of the gaze. The logic of capture is no longer turned outward onto anonymous subjects, but inward, toward the self. This voluntary self-observation blurs the line between observer and observed, between subject and object. And yet, even without external pressure, the mechanisms of datafication remain intact. What we see is a deeply intimate form of self-surveillance – one that renders visible how thoroughly the algorithmic gaze has become embedded in everyday life.

This shift toward the private also resonates historically. The home-bound stillness of lockdown life evokes the Biedermeier era’s turn inward, when the domestic sphere became a refuge from political and social unrest. But Julian disrupts this historical parallel by applying 21st-century methods. The home is no longer merely a place of shelter– it becomes the site of algorithmic self-measurement. The body’s movements are not just lived, but recorded, computed, and rendered.

Within the context of radical⇌matter, Candids offers a vital and poetic reflection on how matter emerges through processes of inscription, transformation, and relation. Julian’s traces are material and immaterial at once– visible marks of invisible patterns, artworks shaped by the same systems that shape our experience of the world. These algorithmically derived compositions echo the spectral language of other works in the exhibition.

In ZOE by Noor Stenfert Kroese and Amir Bastan, for instance, fungal mycelia exchange signals with robotic interfaces in a network of interspecies care – rendering fungal activity perceptible through the mediation of sensors and code. Similarly, in Interference Spores by Shira Wachsmann and John Wild, mycelial communication is amplified to disrupt human technologies, sending interference across WiFi frequencies and blacking out lights. In Atlas of the Liminal, Manu Luksch deploys algorithmic vision to survey the poisoned landscapes of Silicon Valley, exposing the toxic legacies buried beneath the glossy surfaces of Big Tech.