September 19, 2025

Everything Looks Like Art, But Nothing Feels Like Art: A conversation with Ilse Kind on visibility, platforms, and the ghosts of artistic intent

There are moments when a single episode captures, with almost brutal clarity, the contradictions we live with. For artist Ilse Kind, this moment came on Instagram, a platform she had long resisted.

Kind built her practice around anthropomorphizing technologies, questioning the way algorithms influence human condition and inhabit our lives like invasive organisms. She stayed away from Instagram, fully aware of its extractive logic. But when curators began asking for a profile, she gave in. And within months, she landed an institutional show through a post. The platform she critiqued became the mechanism of her recognition.

Ilse Kind: Pride and shame collided. The works I made to expose these technologies were circulated and curated through the same algorithms they question. The museum, too, seemed more interested in how the works performed through visitors’ phone-camera lenses than in the works themselves, as if they were created for content rather than the audience present. I had flattened my works into an aestheticized, scrollable representation. And while trying to dismantle the system, I unwittingly became dependent on it, catching myself refreshing my own feed for one more hit, only to recoil at my reflection on the screen.

This is where the conversation begins. Not with a manifesto, but with a contradiction. What happens when the systems we critique also amplify us? When visibility comes at the cost of distortion? When the exhibition becomes the feed?

FW: We are living through a shift, not just in art, but in culture at large. From ontology to ecology. From what endures to what circulates. From intent to performance. In this landscape, the artwork becomes indistinguishable from the post, and the artist from the user.

But this tension is not entirely new, the need to be seen, the mirror effect, the craving for response, isn’t unique to social media. Perhaps even before the digital era, our relationship with images was shaped by dependency, a hunger for approval, and performativity?

Ilse Kind: Art must be seen, heard, and felt to function socially, which makes it vulnerable to the systems that control visibility in society. From the church, patrons, and later the art market and culture industry, these institutions commissioned works and deployed them as a means to assert their own ideology. This influenced how art was shown, who could access it, and how its meaning was interpreted. I think art’s dependency on visibility has always come with a cost.

Artists have long sought to free art from such institutional control. Think of the Vienna Secessionists, who built neutral exhibition spaces outside state-sanctioned Salons. What began as a radical space for autonomy soon evolved into the ‘white cube’. Sterile and elite, it excluded more than it embraced. Today, we repeat a similar pattern online: platforms like Instagram offer visibility for artists historically excluded. Yet, this access is never neutral. Instagram, too, has its own ideology: the attention economy, where posts are ranked by engagement metrics, ad formats, and moderation regimes, optimized for what keeps us scrolling. In this context, art’s visibility is no longer curated but automated.

FW: When the system not only mediates art’s visibility but also rewrites its ontology, when curation gives way to automation, the work becomes inseparable from the network that presents it. In this sense, the system doesn’t just show art, it quietly authors it, shaping both the audience’s attention and the artist’s intent.

Has the medium changed, or the underlying impulse?

Ilse Kind: Where art platforms create space for reflection, both on and through art, social media transforms this reflection into reaction, turning art’s visibility into quick affirmation. Every tap, notification, and autoplay feeds addictive feedback loops. Artists’ intentions risk being shaped unconsciously; shifting not just how art is perceived and produced, but the reasons it’s made.

As form follows feed, more and more artists create work and build exhibitions with phones in hand, pre-assessing how their art will perform as an image. As the real starts to mimic the digital, inside and outside, artist and audience, absence and presence, all blur into one entangled field. Where art’s value was measured by the original object, later by the ‘genius hand’, today engagement is increasingly becoming the primary measure of value. We may be witnessing the beginning of a shift, where artists and industry alike unconsciously prioritise the photogenic over the phenomenological.

Does our drive for making and viewing art become a hunt for dopamine? Is the post itself now the artwork, not merely documentation, but its final form? Art, not to be felt, but to perform?

FW: The line between art and content is blurring. While the idea that anything can be art is empowering and democratizing, it also risks stripping “art” of its meaning. We’re witnessing a shift from viewing artworks as singular, intentional creations to seeing them as part of a continuous stream of visible content. In this ecology of visibility, where public attention legitimizes value, distinguishing between art and content becomes increasingly difficult. Is the artwork still what endures, or has it become what circulates?

Ilse Kind: Consuming images in a continuous flow numbs us not only to what we see, but to the very act of seeing. By rewarding speed and predictability, these digital platforms flatten differences into sameness. Art loses its force when absorbed into these systems, even though its power lies in surprise, slowness, reflection, and the capacity to unsettle. Works are pressured to conform, to fit the frame, the feed, the scroll. What does not align with this logic is algorithmically punished, filtered out. Posts of my work have been shadowbanned without explanation. Perhaps because they exposed algorithmic logics, acting as an unintentional intervention? In the algorithm’s attempts to obscure, the work asserted its necessity to me: flickering between visibility and absence, where meaning leaks. Why was it hidden? What is at stake?

FW: When everything is relational, are we still speaking about connection, or are we just optimizing for engagement? Just because a post activates a network, does that mean it functions as art? Or is it just content doing what content does?

Ilse Kind: If we define the artwork as the relational system the post activates, we collapse the distinction between artistic intent and platform economy. The artist might ask, “What kind of connection is possible?” while the platform asks, “What kind of behavior can be optimized?”. Confusing the two mistakes attention for connection, virality for impact, and feedback loops for dialogue. What looks like participation may be pacification; what feels like democratization may mask exploitation. If the network becomes the author and artistic intent disappears into the system, what remains?

FW: What looks like participation often masks pacification. What feels like democratization can deepen exploitation. The network rewards presence, but who defines the value of that presence?

In response, Kind proposes not vanishing, not escaping, but embedding. Producing works that algorithmic technologies recognize but do not fully understand. Sculptures that appear functional, but fail to perform. Objects that generate responses, yet resist clear decoding. Reflecting not only on social media algorithms, but on the wider human condition where technologies shape presence.

Ilse Kind: I explore human entanglement with algorithmic technologies as living systems: cameras feeding on presence, engagement seeping through pores. I bring them into the studio as materials and collaborators, whether through surveillance hacks or undercover AI labor. Oscillating between being controlled and controlling them, I develop interspecies assemblages across media, most recently in sculpture where visibility itself engages as a collaborator.

I shape and reshape these sculptures by hand in ongoing dialogue with computer vision: the same vision used by surveillance systems and social media to read images and determine their visibility. In this feedback loop between gesture and code, I form amorphous sculptures toward the threshold where the machine flags something “worth attention”, such as a human. In the material encounter, limbs act as lures, while their ambiguity misleads the classifiers trying to read them. The algorithm stumbles over their own misrecognitions, producing false positives, like prey that turns out poisonous.

These algorithmically-conditioned works continue the coded language traditionally carried by art, embodying power, belief, and identity. Within this new regime of encoding, machines see, read, and shape physical bodies into digital legibility. Here, visibility itself negotiates how the work appears, how it’s read, and moves back into circulation

At the core of both our practices lies a shared inquiry: can art survive inside this system? Can meaning emerge through the logic of the network itself, not despite it, but because of it? Fakewhale infuses the system with everything it wants to see, while quietly unraveling the logic from within. Using the mechanisms of contemporary circulation not just as a site, but also as the medium and form, Fakewhale Studio creates seemingly physical, hyper visible, materially absent artworks, stretching the artwork as a post. Where Fakewhale is researching this phenomenon mostly digitally ‘’inside-out’, Kind is doing so mostly physically ‘’outside-in’’, meeting at the same point of critique.

This isn’t resistance through absence. It’s resistance through presence.

So what now?

Perhaps what’s needed is not a perfect answer, but a shared position. A fragment, a proposition, a conceptual detour. Not to resolve the system, but to confuse it in productive ways.

*The accompanying images are captured by Ilse Kind, enacting our dialogue on visibility through everyday encounters that take on the fleeting guise of art.