This interactive experience is provided by Dries Depoorter\u2019s Recharge XL<\/em> (2024\u201325). <\/em>On display in Wintercircus, a technology start-up campus in Ghent, Belgium, the artwork immerses spectators entirely by demanding their embodied, attentive, and biometric participation. Constructed out of common public infrastructure\u200a\u2014\u200abenches, charging cords, and surveillance cameras\u200a\u2014\u200aand placed in the centre of what Wintercircus identifies as its public square, the artworkblends into familiar surroundings, concealing its immersive capture. Indeed, Depoorter appears to do no more than re-create the mundane routine of plugging in our phones before sleeping to ensure that they are fully charged in the morning. Within the context of an aesthetic experience, and given the low stakes of engagement, participation is framed as a worthwhile cultural activity that even provides a generous service: Let us take away the distraction of your phone and enable you to rest! We will even charge your phone while you do it.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n As an artist working with themes of privacy, artificial intelligence (AI), surveillance, and social media, Depoorter routinely utilizes irony to illuminate the plight of our contemporary cultural condition. This approach is demonstrated with Recharge XL<\/em>, where the simplicity of its central premise belies the reality of the demands it places on participants. The extent of engagement is not limited to a brief repose, and the outcome is more than a charged phone; by engaging, people are, rather literally, plugging themselves into larger frameworks of domination and control. To facilitate recharging, Recharge XL <\/em>requires that participants place themselves under the persistent gaze of networked cameras running facial-recognition algorithms for the operation of the artwork\u2019s bespoke open\/closed detection system. This detection system works by recognizing the facial features seen through the surveillance cameras that are then run through the neural network model FocalNet. FocalNet compares the data produced live with historical data to determine a singularized output\u200a\u2014\u200ayour eyes are either open or closed. Although this appears to be a harmless gesture with modest outcomes, FocalNet is trained on multiple datasets, including the largest image database for computer vision training, ImageNet, which is notorious for executing biased \u201cmisrecognition.\u201d1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, \u201cExcavating AI: The Politics of Images in Machine Learning Training Sets,\u201d Excavating AI<\/em>, December 10, 2025, accessible online.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n ImageNet was created in 2009 by Stanford University AI researcher Fei-Fei Li for the purpose of training object-recognition models. The database contains over fourteen million hand-tagged images spanning a broad range of categories, from household objects to people. With this significant quantity of data, ImageNet aims to provide a foundational resource for training computer vision systems to effectively characterize new images. A model trained on the ImageNet database would be able to compare new images against historical data, making inferences to determine what the new image is without having to utilize direct human input. At times inaccurate deductions are drawn, resulting in the model misrecognizing what it sees. Whereas a misidentified fruit or car may be a harmless offence, the same dataset contains numerous categories for people, classifying images of individuals according to rigid and reductive labels. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2019, AI researcher Kate Crawford and surveillance artist Trevor Paglen critiqued the \u201cpeople\u201d category of ImageNet as a biased system of classification in their interactive digital artwork ImageNet Roulette<\/em>. ImageNet\u2019s \u201cpeople\u201d category is frequently used to train facial- The labels reflect the exploitative nature of their origins. The task of image labelling was initially assigned to graduate students at Stanford University but, given the desire for a totalizing amount of information, the cost of image labelling at graduate student pay rates was too high and the process too lengthy for it to work. As a result, the task was reassigned to underpaid gig workers through Amazon\u2019s Mechanical Turk program. Largely unknown workers with arguably minimal training were tasked with determining what they saw in each image, resulting in a database rife with normative bias. Presumably, those exploited in the labelling process will be those most susceptible to the potential harms resulting from instances of AI \u201cmisrecognition.\u201d Given the positivistic framing of algorithmic decision making and the detachment from subjective, in-person input, accountability for harms is difficult to discern. Through the attention produced by ImageNet Roulette<\/em>, ImageNet researchers took the \u201cfirst steps\u201d to counteracting bias in the dataset, such as removing a significant number of images in the \u201cpeople\u201d category.3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Kaiyu Yang et al., \u201cTowards Fairer Datasets: Filtering and Balancing the Distribution of the People Subtree in the ImageNet Hierarchy,\u201d FAT* ’20:<\/em> Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency<\/em>, ACM Digital Library, January 27, 2020, 547\u201358, accessible online.<\/span> However, problems cannot be localized solely to data, programmers, or source code, insofar as programmed biases reflect the normative context within which we exist. Even if no direct harms are perceptible when the ImageNet training data is used, as it is in Recharge XL<\/em>, what normative framework does continued use of such data endorse? More than this, how are those unknowingly immersed in the bind to be made aware of the consequences of their engagement?<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Recharge XL<\/em>, Depoorter deploys what Michel Foucault calls a \u201cnetwork of permanent observation,\u201d creating a scenario that disciplines participants into being docile bodies servicing the demands of their devices and the frameworks of control that they are connected to.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison<\/em>, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 2012), 295.<\/span> The structure of the artwork reproduces the architectural foundation of the Foucauldian panopticon where one guard sits in a central watchtower surveilling a circle of subjects. Regardless of whether they are directly watched, the possibility of surveillance ensures that subjects reform themselves. From every angle of Recharge XL<\/em>\u2019s rotunda, participants exist under the possible gaze of the camera and the calculating program registering their behaviour. Unable to discern whether the cameras are processing their positioning when their eyes are closed, participants internalize the surveillance gaze and remain compliant. Unlike the Foucauldian panopticon, in Recharge XL<\/em> immersion is amplified because at no point are the participants left alone. No matter when they leave the space of engagement, their data has already been registered, and later, when they scroll online\u200a\u2014\u200aon their charged phones\u200a\u2014\u200athey are looped back into data-driven surveillance systems insofar as smartphone applications deploy algorithmic tactics that likewise track user behaviour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The spectators trading digital connection at the expense of privacy and in-person connection is not a mere invention for the purpose of an artwork. Rather, Recharge XL<\/em> reproduces the Faustian pact that digital users make with Silicon Valley which is the foundation of what economic scholar Shoshana Zuboff calls \u201csurveillance capitalism.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power<\/em> (New York: PublicAffairs, 2020).<\/span> According to Zuboff, data giants like Google, Meta, and Microsoft\u200a\u2014\u200asurveillance capitalists\u200a\u2014\u200acreate and administer technologies required for everyday life in the digital age, from telecommunications that enable connection to others to innocuous necessities like smart-home thermostats and speaker-based AI assistants. Surveillance capitalists collect any and all data that inform them of our behaviour, not only to know it but to actively shape it, intervening in the \u201ceveryday state of play.\u201d As a result, the information generated by our aimless scrolling online and the latent soundscapes picked up by virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa are fed into data-driven systems used to inform not only the corporate profit motive but, given the increasingly intertwined relationship between state and private actors, social and political life more broadly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In continuing to use these technologies, we exchange fundamental aspects of human experience, such as the right to be free from surveillance and to shape our own meaningful existence, for digital access. Given the inescapability of such data-driven technologies, it appears that there is no way out. Like participants in Recharge XL<\/em>,we are completely immersed.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Recharge XL <\/em>creates an aesthetic context premised on a totalizing form of participant capture akin to those of popular forms of image-based immersion, from virtual reality to the notoriously pervasive digital amplifications of modernist artworks. Instead of emphasizing immersion through the theatricalizing of spectacle, Depoorter re-creates the routine circumstances of digital immersion and its latent surveillance context constitutive of contemporary experience. As a result, the sedative effects of immersion\u2019s illusion, which allows us to inhabit an otherworldly aesthetic space, never take effect and so never wear off. Participants may not even recognize that they are immersed. Such tactics are in line with the imperatives of surveillance capitalism that aim at a psychic numbing by aligning your compliance in being surveilled with your perceived freedom\u200a\u2014\u200ayou think you are free and so do not perceive the limitations placed upon you. You have chosen to be here, sitting on these benches, under these cameras, on your smartphone. Or, if you understand the consequences of participation, they are disregarded out of a deep ambivalence. You have nothing to hide and nothing to lose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet, the numbing preoccupation of Recharge XL <\/em>precludes both the connection to others and the self-understanding that form the groundwork for genuine human freedom. In the public square, where people could form meaningful human connections or benefit from casual conversation, they are locked into themselves, eyes closed and individualized under the guise of body and device recharging. By ensuring a charged phone, Recharge XL <\/em>encourages the predicament of device dependency wherein solitude emerges in public, and public life diffuses into the moments we have to ourselves. In both cases, the benefits of being alone and being with others are eroded in favour of continual immersion in online life. In our dependency, the presence of digital technologies in our everyday experience recedes into the background so that consideration of their potentially harmful effects becomes secondary to the primacy of our persistent interfacing with them. All the while, our continued activity undercuts our freedom and ensures our ensnarement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Recharge XL <\/em>highlights the banality of contemporary surveillance wherein we consent to being tracked under the guise of a fruitful return, substituting the spectacle of popular immersion for the subdued strategy of offering a playful and ostensibly innocent service. However, like the pact offered by surveillance capitalists, Recharge XL <\/em>takes more than what it offers. Most viscerally, by participating in Recharge XL<\/em>,the Wintercircus social hub is drained of its purported aim by isolating visitors into individualized charging pods, eliminating the face-to-face connection with other people, which is arguably a central feature of a meaningful human life. As Zuboff writes, \u201c\u2018Recognition\u2019 is the glimmer of homecoming we experience in our beloved\u2019s face, not \u2018facial recognition,\u2019\u201d which Recharge XL <\/em>deploys.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, <\/em>521.<\/span> Given the nature of Depoorter\u2019s work, it is likely that he knows this to be the case. The question remains, however, to what extent those participating in his artwork or, indeed, in the broader context of surveillance capitalism, do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Curved wooden slats resembling a reclining park bench form a repose that caresses participants\u2019 bodies. The seating stretches out into an expansive circle, broken at two points to enable the flow of bodies in and out of the space. Charging pads punctuate the seats at regular intervals, enabling those who sit for a rest to plug in their phone, guided by the embossed command: \u201cCharge your phone while recharging yourself.\u201d<\/br>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":273040,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[882],"tags":[],"numeros":[7754],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[6058],"artistes":[7797,7793,2081],"thematiques":[],"type_post":[],"class_list":["post-273050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post","numeros-116-immersion-en","auteurs-kristen-lewis-en","artistes-dries-depoorter-en","artistes-kate-crawford-en","artistes-trevor-paglen-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=273050"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273050\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":273060,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273050\/revisions\/273060"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/273040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273050"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=273050"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=273050"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=273050"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=273050"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=273050"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=273050"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=273050"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=273050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Dries](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/116_DO_Lewis_Dries-Depoorter_RechargeXL_09-scaled.jpg\")
Recharge XL,<\/em> 2024-2025, installation view,
Wintercircus, Ghent, 2025.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Dries](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/116_DO_Lewis_Dries-Depoorter_RechargeXL_35-scaled.jpg\")
Recharge XL,<\/em> 2024-2025, installation view,
Wintercircus, Ghent, 2025.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
recognition systems that, in turn, may classify individuals in situations with significant outcomes, such as those deployed by law enforcement, government services, and employers. As part of their exhibition Training Humans<\/em> (2019\u200a\u2013<\/em>\u200a20) at Fondazione Prada\u2019s Osservatorio space in Milan, Crawford and Paglen created an online and in-person application that allowed users to upload a photo of themselves and be classified according to an AI model trained on ImageNet. As numerous users recount, and as Crawford and Paglen intended to show, the identification process is severely flawed, producing labels that are frequently racist, sexist, and heteronormative.2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Naomi Rea, \u201cHow ImageNet Roulette, an Art Project That Went Viral by Exposing Facial Recognition\u2019s Biases, Is Changing People\u2019s Minds About AI,\u201d artnet<\/em>, September 23, 2019, accessible online; Julia Carrie Wong, \u201cThe viral selfie app ImageNet Roulette seemed fun\u200a\u2014\u200auntil it called me a racist slur,\u201d The Guardian<\/em>, September 18, 2019, accessible online.<\/span> While those wearing glasses might be labelled as \u201cnerds,\u201d people of colour might be classified according to racial slurs and women by sexist descriptors.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Kate](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/116_DO_Lewis_Trevor-Paglen_TrainingHumans_10-scaled.jpg\")
Training Humans<\/em>, 2019-2020, exhibition view, Osservatorio Fondazione Prada,
Milan, 2020.
Photo: Marco Cappelletti, courtesy of the artists & Fondazione Prada, Milan<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Kate](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/116_DO_Lewis_Trevor-Paglen_TrainingHumans_08-scaled.jpg\")
Training Humans<\/em>, 2019-2020, exhibition view,
Osservatorio Fondazione Prada,
Milan, 2020.
Photo: Marco Cappelletti, courtesy of the artists &
Fondazione Prada, Milan<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n
![\"Dries](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/116_DO_Lewis_Dries-Depoorter_RechargeXL_13-scaled.jpg\")
Recharge XL,<\/em> 2024-2025, installation view,
Wintercircus, Ghent, 2025.
Photo: courtesy fo the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n