Snowangel

In this work, I use the angel as a metaphor for new technologies and media.Angels can be described as messengers, transmitting signals and information from a divine source to Earth. They are also imagined as recorders: filming, archiving, and creating vast databases or surveillance networks that claim to know everything, even our deepest desires and sins.

This raises the question: can angels be seen as our protectors, watching over us even as we sleep? Or are they better understood as surveillant monitors, governing and controlling human behavior?

I am interested in how technology penetrates our bodies how algorithms shape our being through constant biohacking, blurring of boundaries between the material and the digital. While at the same time, algorithms and artificial intelligence are trained and coming to presence only through human data.

Group Exhibition at Ballhaus Ost, Berlin
Installation and programming: Hannah Borghese
Sound: Beril Evlimoğlu

How it works:

Visitors can lay on a mattress, facing a screen that mirrors their face in real time. Using facial recognition, the system detects when the mouth opens or closes. When open, the sound plays through headphones; when closed, it stops. At the end the face is slowly fading out, and the sound switches to external speakers.

This creates a situation where the person lying on the bed lets the angel speak through them. An angel made of light, flickering across the screen as it uses the human body. On the screen, the person slowly dissolves, revealing more and more of the snow angel’s imprint in the mattress beneath, an imprint that needs a real body to exist.