Cadie Desbiens-Desmeules^CA/QC

Cadie Desbiens-Desmeules is currently based in Lisbon, Portugal. Her practice is either site-specific or installation-based, spanning multiple surfaces or immersive environments. Drawing on her background experience as a journalist, she casts a critical eye over technological trends with artworks that provokes thoughts and internal discussions around how we relate and engage with new technologies. Desbiens-Desmeules has presented her work worldwide, including digital art festivals and art galleries such as Arsenal Contemporary Art, the International Symposium for Electronic Art (ISEA) and TodaysArt.

In 2019, We Are Europe (WAE) selected Desbiens-Desmeules as one of the 64 artists, speakers and public figures they consider the most inspiring European personalities. In 2021, her work was selected in the 5th International Digital Art Biennial (BIAN) alongside artists like Refik Anadol and Riochi Kurokawa. She is also active as a creative director and visual artist under the pseudonym Push 1 stop, collaborating with top industry talent and agencies such as Silent Partners Studio, where she has been working for Riot Games, Beyoncé, Jay-Z, BTS, Billie Eilish and Bruno Mars, to name a few.

I’m not a robot is a series of applications exploring the murky world of digital labour and human intelligence tasks. A captcha seems like a harmless annoyance to a user, but it’s a powerful and lucrative method of extracting free labour as we’ve collectively been training AI for free by solving Google’s reCAPTCHA puzzles for decades. To date, it’s estimated that Google has extracted $7.3 billion worth of free labour using this method.

Data labeling is the fuel that powers machine learning. The artist messes with this process to generate images that are impossible to identify by feeding thousands of cat images to an AI model specialized in identifying cars. It resulted in absurd looking creatures that are neither cat nor car. Regardless of the selections made, the application will continue to ask for more. The viewer is encouraged to click and click, offering an ever-increasing amount of precious intelligence training for free.