HERSOID’s Working Under Surveillance series is a biting, poetic critique of algorithmic oversight and the quiet violence of modern data culture. By overlaying facial recognition markers and alphanumeric IDs onto anachronistic figures—farmhands, gauchos, workers drawn from pastoral or folkloric pasts—the series constructs a visual language that’s both absurd and alarming. It stages a conceptual collision between pre-digital identity and the cold mechanics of contemporary surveillance.
In the second piece, a trio of traditionally dressed rural men—likely Latin American gauchos—stand in casual camaraderie. They seem unaware, or perhaps resigned, as their faces are boxed and triangulated by biometric mapping. Above each head hovers a unique identifier, part bureaucratic gibberish, part dystopian poetry. The work doesn’t simply critique the future—it suggests that history itself is being retrofitted into the grid of surveillance, scanned and filed regardless of its original context.
What’s striking across the series is HERSOID’s use of visual contradiction: the soft textures and linework evoke warmth and nostalgia, while the hard-edged overlays of AI recognition systems cut across the image like a scalpel. This duality foregrounds the absurdity of our era—where everything from innocence to ancestry is fair game for algorithmic scrutiny.
Thematically, Working Under Surveillance asks: What happens to human identity when it is relentlessly abstracted into data? How do we reconcile romanticized images of the past with the reality of digital intrusion? And crucially, how complicit are we in aestheticizing our own loss of privacy?
The series isn’t alarmist—it’s diagnostic. It doesn’t scream rebellion, it mutters resistance. HERSOID’s figures don’t appear oppressed in a theatrical sense; rather, they’re quietly flattened, re-coded, their humanity slowly leaking away under the weight of metadata. And in that subtle erosion lies the series’ true power.
