Beyond the Screen

Client
Barcelona Activa
Year
2025
Type of sector
Technology
Tag
Installations

In today's world, where screens have become just as commonplace and omnipresent as windows themselves, it's easy to overlook the symbiotic, shaping relationship that we have with digital technology. And yet, as we look into a screen, it looks back into our eyes — just as humans shape and determine the future and direction in which we bring our technological creations, as we interact with these same creations, we partially internalize their mode of perception and understanding too. The screens shape and determine us...

This "cyborg" existence, or interaction, is exactly what we sought to expose in "Beyond the Screen," an immersive installation that was first exhibited with Barcelona Activa at ISE 2025, the leading audiovisual and systems integration exhibition in Europe. By taking on the viewpoint of “machine eyes,” we wanted to explore how these technologies perceive and shape human behaviour in real-time. Instead of rendering a verdict on AI, our focus was on demystifying its inner workings—fostering a deeper public understanding of both the seemingly simple applications and the potential pitfalls of algorithmic surveillance. We developed three “windows,” each focusing on a different scale at which these technologies operate: individual, collective and urban.

At the individual level:

As visitors interacted personally and directly with the set-up, we used landmark detection, face recognition, and tracking tools to show how algorithms are able to read and analyze human bodies, often at a level of detail and awareness that might threaten our right to individual privacy. However, these tools can also be invaluable when it comes to detecting, for example, medical or safety issues. Algorithms can sometimes misinterpret data, making crucial mistakes with human consequences due to errors in the data processing or algorithmic bias.

At a collective scale:

And yet, of course, these algorithms also operate at a larger scale, studying groups of people, agglomerates of these individual entities that are to be analyzed and classified. In the "collective" sectors of the installation, we thus focused on technologies used to monitor, detect, surveil, and analyze the movements and activities of people and elements in shared spaces. These technologies often detect hidden patterns in group collective movements, often unbeknownst to the people within the group.

At an urban scale scope:

Finally, the largest order of magnitude we represented was the urban level, using images of Barcelona to explore how these algorithms can watch and track cities "from afar," mapping beyond personal and group contexts to shape the city environments in which we evolve. This shows us that, just as we build and shape these technologies, their functioning influences and affects us just as much — often in ways we can't quite perceive at an initial glance.