Exhibited at Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), Lasalle School of the Arts, Singapore. 21 Jun – 24 July 2019, and Gerðarsafn - Kópavogur Art Museum, Kópavogur, Iceland. June 2021. Inspired by sphinxes as living images, guardians of thresholds, riddlers and stranglers, I consider the central tragedy of the myth of Oedipus, which I interpret as a crisis of misrecognition, through the lenses of contemporary forms and regimes of capture (language, law, machine learning). I am interested in the concept of a deep disposition that eludes narrative and interpretive capture.In the video, a vocal track narrating an interpretation of the central tragedy of the myth of Oedipus is overlaid upon a video sequence of film clips and gifs of women (and one android) in moments of transformation, transcendence, and altered states, that is fed through Google’s Vision API, an image content recognition and deep learning interface. Sliding through the interface, the video shows each image through the program’s descriptive categories, which include facial and object recognition, emotional tone, material properties, and mature content. Its limitations and generalities are in part intended for its utility – to sieve, rate, and restrict content, to cluster information in large groupings, but to also raise the question of how these seemingly removed, yet utterly ubiquitous mechanisms of image regulation and interpretation might affect our own descriptive categories: how misrecognition might layer upon misrecognition into asphyxiated rather than generative loops. By focusing on the inhuman scale and articulations of its machinic gaze – simultaneously the gaze of a thousand interpreters in chorus – and a myth that considers recognition, gateways, and riddles, I consider the ways law, code, flesh, affect and enunciation come together. The three prints capture various dispositions of misrecognition, and the casts of a lion mask are inversions of the oral space of the archetypal sphinx (typically, a human upper body and leonine lower half), the space that riddles. The cast was taken from a styrofoam lion mask, which I had worn during a performance in 2018. The oral cavity of the mask was shaped such that I could only wear the mask with my mouth partially open against the material. It kept me effectively gagged, reminiscent of the Venetian Moretta mask that is held to the face through a button in the mouth area, enforcing silence. This body of work began as a response to an invitation to create a piece for a group show between Singaporean and Icelandic artists called Object of Desire, whose theme was inspired by a 2010 essay written by Hito Steyerl, titled A Thing Like You and Me, in which she considers the merits and capaciousness of objectification, given that “[t]hings are never just inert objects, passive items, or lifeless shucks, but consist of tensions, forces, hidden powers, all being constantly exchanged.”