Ideal Behaviour - EMAP residence 2024

Photo: Mia Mäkelä

M-CULT proudly presents our EMAP 2024 resident artists Andreas Zingerle (AT) in collaboration with Linda Kronman (FI).

‘Ideal Behavior’ is a media art project that addresses the ways AI affects the employment sector. IKEA as an internationally well-known employer has pioneered the use of AI in job recruiting. Thus, the company serves as a case study for media artists Andreas Zingerle and Linda Kronman as they test popular tricks and AI tools in order to optimize their performance for AI augmented employment processes. Will they succeed in matching the metrics of an ideal candidate? Can they pass the recruiting bot and get interviewed by a human?

Under scrutiny are claims that AI tools are fairer than human recruiter because of their ability to erase gender, race, ethnicity and age from the hiring process. By focusing on measuring skills and personality AI tools are marketed as an objective option to evaluate candidates effectively replacing human bias. However, identity is not a collection of attributes that can be switched off. Neither is de-biasing the decisions made by individual human recruiters a way to fix systematic problems of discrimination in working culture.

What AI recruiting tools do, is that they reflect longer histories of taxonomical sorting unveiling ideals about the hirable individual. Therefore, the artwork investigates how AI amplifies and reproduces ideal behavior when both recruiting and job seeking is increasingly automatized.
In the process of collecting different perspectives into a video installation, the collaborating artists engage with influencers who consult job-seekers with AI tips & tricks, IKEA employees, other job-seekers, HR-professionals, Headhunters, AI-developers and researchers.

Andreas Zingerle is a media artist who received his PhD from the University of Art and Design Linz researching vigilante counter-movements and anti-fraud activism. He implements social engineering strategies that emerge in his research into interactive narratives, artistic installations, data visualizations and creative media competence training with a focus on Open Source tools and workflows.

Linda Kronman is a media artist and PhD researcher in a digital humanities project called Machine Vision in Everyday Life at the University of Bergen. Her research on how machine vision is represented in digital art draws on feminist, posthuman and critical theory. By combining methods from humanities with artistic explorations she engages with the ways art can help us think differently about AI.

Since 2010 Andreas and Linda have collaborated under the collective name Kairus exploring the use and abuse of technologies through practice-based research which is closely intertwined with their artistic production. In 2022 Kairus was awarded the Outstanding Artist Award by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts and Culture.

The artists were in Helsinki in late February, late March and July of 2024.
Feel free to contact us if you want to collaborate with the project.