The distorted letter combination formed from desert sand comes from a CAPTCHA security puzzle (aka fully automated public Turing tests that must be completed in the digital world to distinguish computers from humans). After numerous failed attempts to log into his Wikipedia account, the artist gave up trying to recall his password and began deciphering the distorted letters automatically generated by the CAPTCHA service as an alternative login option. One of the text fragments that Wikipedia’s artificial intelligence model asked him to decipher in order to gain access was „democary“ – a misspelling of the English term democracy, which comes from Greek: demos means people and kratia means power or rule. During the exhibition, as an integral part of the work, the sand text inevitably changes its shape, whether as a result of minor accidents or deliberate touches by passers-by.

The work is part of the exhibition Galatea’s Triumph: Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence in the exhibition hall on the 5th floor of Kumu.