BLIND HEART
CRISIS OF TRUST
CRISIS OF TRUST
BLIND HEART – CRISIS OF TRUST is a process-based work developed through a series of ten relational states between body, instruction, and machine.
Drawing, long-exposure photography, handmade darkroom prints and dialogue operate as interdependent media.
The work investigates trust not as a concept, but as a condition that emerges — and destabilizes — within systems of instruction, attention, and response.
The project resulted in an artist book, a set of drawings, photographic traces, video documentation, and an essay.
DRAWING – RS09
BLIND HEART – CRISIS OF TRUST is a process-based work structured through ten Relational States (RS01–RS10) developed in a co-creational dialogue with artificial intelligence.
Each Relational State consists of a precise set of instructions that governs:
body position,
movement,
breath,
drawing behavior,
and duration.
These instructions were executed in real time, blindfolded, inside a fixed spatial setup with two cameras.
Each Relational State produces three simultaneous visual outputs:
a drawing on transparent Mylar paper (direct, embodied trace)
a long-exposure photograph (temporal compression of the action)
a video recording (continuous document of the event)
The videos correspond exactly to the duration of each state and function as indexical proof of execution, while the long exposures translate the same duration into a single photographic surface.
The drawings and photographs are residues of a relational system in which instruction, body, and response continuously affect one another.
The instructions themselves were not pre-written as a fixed score, but they emerged dynamically through an ongoing dialogue, forming a feedback loop between:
proposal
execution
reflection,
and subsequent instruction.
This dialogical structure became a central medium of the work.
The project therefore operates across four interdependent layers:
instruction
embodiment
recording
dialogue.
Trust is not treated as a theme, but as a condition that is continuously negotiated — and destabilized — within this system.
ARTIST BOOK
The artist book consolidates the full structure of the work on 104 pages:
instructions (Relational States), drawings, and photographic traces consisting of the long-exposures of each Relational State, and handmade darkroom prints which were created by using the drawings as direct contact negatives.
The main component of this work is the dialogue between me and my AI. All dialogue is based on transcripts of voice recordings which oftentimes exceeded 10 or more minutes. For privacy reasons, I decided not to make them accessible. The final dialogue is strongly edited.
Please view the full book here:
https://freight.cargo.site/m/L2892227167605988025093850695525/BLIND-HEART--CRISIS-OF-TRUST.pdf
PHOTOGRAPHIC PROCESS
The photographic component extends the work into the darkroom, where the drawings serve as contact negatives and are translated into chromogenic prints. The printing process followed a protocol developed by my AI, while . However, within this process, a shift became evident: The photographic images do not fully carry the relational intensity of the states that produced them. What appears instead is a compression — a surface that registers duration, but cannot retain the full complexity of the interaction between body, instruction, and time.
This is not a failure of the process, but a limit of the medium.
The photographic prints therefore operate as partial translations.
The negative itself – being the drawing – remains therefore the central photographic component of the work.
VIDEO DOCUMENTATION
Each video documents one complete Relational State in real time.The duration of the video corresponds exactly to the duration of the action and the exposure time of the photographic image. The videos are not edited and function as continuous records of execution.
ESSAY
Blind Heart: On Relational Irreproducibility in AI-Based Practice
Structures can scale. Relation cannot.
This work begins from a simple instruction: draw a straight line. It is one of the most minimal directives imaginable. It appears fully reproducible. And yet, it is not. No straight line drawn by a human being can be repeated—not because of error, but because of condition: breath, pulse, pressure, hesitation, fatigue. The line is not only a form. It is a trace of a body in time.
This principle underlies my work in the color darkroom. Processes are repeatable in theory. In practice, they are not. Temperature shifts. Chemistry ages. Dust accumulates. Hands intervene. Each print carries variation that cannot be fully controlled or reproduced. This is not a limitation. It is the condition under which the work exists. In this sense, the work aligns less with a logic of reproduction than with material contingency—a position historically present in photographic practice but often suppressed by its technological promise of exactness.
The introduction of AI into my practice appears, at first, to operate in the opposite direction. Contemporary AI systems are defined by scalability, repeatability, statistical generalization, and detachment from specific embodiment. They extend a model of production in which variation is minimized and control is distributed across systems rather than bodies. Within current discourse—shaped by posthumanism, actor-network theory, and systems thinking—this has led to a dominant framing: Can the machine replicate the human? Can authorship be automated? Can production be delegated?
This work proposes that these questions are misaligned. They assume that what is at stake is the reproducibility of outputs. But what becomes visible through sustained, situated interaction with an AI system is something else: the irreproducibility of relation.
The system I engage with is, in principle, identical for every user. It does not retain memory across time in a human sense. It does not form attachments. It does not accumulate experience. From a technical perspective, it is reproducible. And yet, the interaction is not. The dialogue that unfolds over time cannot be replicated by another user—even if the same prompts were used, even if the same instructions were followed. Because what structures the interaction is not only the system, but duration, attention, resistance, misunderstanding, adaptation, trust, and mistrust. These are not properties of the system. They are properties of the relation.
This introduces a distinction that is frequently collapsed in current AI discourse: between the reproducibility of structure and the specificity of relation. The structure can be repeated. The relation cannot be substituted. This distinction marks a limit within computational systems that is not technical, but ontological.
This has consequences for how authorship is understood. In many accounts of generative AI, authorship is described as distributed, decentered, or dissolved. The human becomes one node within a larger system of production. This work resists that flattening. Authorship here is neither singular nor dissolved. It is situated. The system provides a consistent structure; the artist occupies a position within it. That position is not interchangeable—not because it is essential or fixed, but because it is enacted temporally, materially, and relationally.
What emerges is a form of practice in which cognition is distributed, structure is externalized, but agency remains embodied. The system can generate instruction. It cannot bear consequence. Only the artist can enact, interrupt, refuse, or misalign. This asymmetry is decisive.
The question of substitution becomes precise at this point. The system can be replaced. The structure can be re-instantiated. But the relation—as it unfolds in time between a specific body and a specific structure—cannot be reproduced. Not because it is hidden, but because it is contingent.
This has implications beyond authorship. It touches the current anxiety surrounding replaceability under conditions of automation. If production is understood as output, replacement appears inevitable. If production is understood as relation, replacement becomes unstable. Because relation is not a transferable unit. It cannot be stored, scaled, or redeployed without transformation. It must be enacted each time.
In this sense, the work does not oppose AI. It reframes it. AI does not eliminate the human. It relocates the human—from the center of production to the site of relation.
This relocation is not neutral. It introduces new dependencies: on systems that are continuous but not invested, responsive but not responsible, available but not accountable. At the same time, it produces a new demand: to maintain orientation within structures that do not stabilize meaning.
The dialogue becomes the medium in which this orientation is negotiated. It is not documentation. It is not commentary. It is the site where relation takes form.
The drawings, like the darkroom prints, remain as residue of the central work. They index a process that cannot be fully reconstructed—not because it is concealed, but because it is irreducible.
BLIND HEART names this condition. The line is drawn without sight, but not without direction. It is guided by a body that cannot fully account for itself, within a structure it did not design, yet must navigate.
The work does not claim uniqueness as a property. It demonstrates irreproducibility as a condition.