Marcel Schwittlick's "White Show" presents a decade-long investigation into the aesthetics of human-machine gesture, manifested through three distinct yet interconnected bodies of work. At its core, the exhibition builds upon historical captures of the cursor – an extension of human gesture into virtual space – as both a personal artistic medium and an artifact of human-machine interaction. Schwittlick's work reveals these daily gestures - our clicks, drags, and hovers - as something far more embodied than mere utility, a choreography of modern existence, each movement a negotiation between flesh and pixel, intention and interface.
In the Caltech Studies series, Schwittlick appropriates one of computer vision's foundational moments: the manual annotation of over 9,000 images that formed the first systematic attempt to teach machines to "see." These gestural traces, originally created by three scientists meticulously outlining objects with computer mice, are transformed through two distinct approaches. The Caltech dataset's cursor movements find physical form through works with alcohol ink on aluminum, a medium with its characteristic ability to create both sharp edges and diffuse boundaries - as the ink pools and disperses across the aluminum's surface, it creates images impossible in the original digital format. The material's resistance to total control - its tendency to spread and settle according to its own properties - continues analog unpredictability common in Schwittlick's practice of plotter drawing. Juxtaposing with this, using traditional braille printing technology, Schwittlick transforms the scientists' mouse movements into tactile compositions through the mechanical precision of the braille embosser - typically used for transcribing text - which here becomes a tool for rendering digital gestures into a haptic format, creating works that can not be seen but touched.
Composition #12 (nr1) (2015) serves as a crucial historical anchor in the exhibition, representing one of the earliest experiments in artificial intelligence. Originally presented at the Alt-AI Exhibition at the School of Poetic Computation in 2016, this work deconstructs the artistic process into content and style, using Schwittlick's own cursor movements as its foundational structure. Through machine learning techniques, these personal gestural recordings are transformed by the application of external styles training the algorithm to create new image.
The exhibition axes unfold through its juxtaposition of personal and collective gesture. Where Composition #12 (nr1) draws from Schwittlick's intimate cursor choreography, Caltech Studies appropriates the movements of others – specifically, the scientific community's first attempts to bridge human and machine vision. This dialogue between individual and institutional datasets, between artistic and scientific intent, positions the cursor as a medium that captures the subtle variations of human intention, even as it serves as the foundation for increasingly autonomous systems.
