As processes become more accomplished and, more importantly, our reliance on machine learning steadily increases, so does our trust in anthropomorphic digital outcomes. This can inevitably lead to a trust in machine-based spiritual assessments, even from the calculations of the human body. This is what the Chiromancer installation does. Realised by Giacomo Piazzi & Matthias Pitscher, the installation uses a flatbed scanner to read hands and then biometric data and “cloud-based knowledge” to make its predictions. Quantification, done through local and remote data, becomes esoteric, and the predictive model finally finds an appropriate place for its purely probabilistic nature. The map of the hand is printed on a dot-matrix printer, along with two elaborate texts about Analysis and Fate, which, in an outdated but still formal form, provide the pseudo-scientific narrative that the audience desires.

 

Giacomo Piazzi & Matthias Pitscher – The Chiromancer