Arden Schager
Ghost in the Machine
Bio:
Arden Schager is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher based in New York. His work spans interactive media, speculative design, and bio-art, with recent exhibitions at BRIC, Grace Exhibition Space, and Plexus Projects. He holds an MFA in Design & Technology from Parsons School of Design and a BS in Computer Science from Stanford University.
​
Artist statement:
My practice explores how identity and agency shift within ecological and computational systems. I build time-based works that integrate code, robotics, and material processes to examine transformation, collapse, and feedback. Informed by posthuman and materialist theory, I treat machines, organisms, and signals as co-authors in emergent, unstable networks where meaning blurs and new relations arise.
​
country: USA
​
Ghost in the Machine
It is a browser-based audiovisual work that algorithmically disassembles and reassembles faces from the “Faces in the Wild” dataset. Inspired by the surrealist exquisite corpse, it uses p5.js to generate shifting, ghostly composites—some recognizable, others monstrous. A layered audio track composed of sliced speech and static echoes this fragmentation, producing a sensory fugue of identity. The piece reflects on how algorithmic systems don’t just recognize us—they recompose us, turning personhood into spectral data.
While Ghost in the Machine does not employ generative AI tools directly, it repurposes the “Faces in the Wild” dataset—a benchmark dataset developed for facial recognition algorithms. The project critically reinterprets this dataset to explore the distortive aesthetics and ethics of algorithmic vision, making visible the logics AI systems use to parse and reconstruct identity.
This reframing treats AI training data as a sculptural medium, subverting its intended use to question how machinic systems define and dismantle the self.
​
