Annual programme 2026: CAPTCHA Realism

There was a time when one’s status as verifiably human could be taken for granted. Today, however, the question seems no longer “Are you human?” but rather “Can you be perceived as human?” 

In the age of machine-mediated recognition, being human is not an ontological given but a bureaucratic achievement: a status granted, measured, and confirmed through algorithmic thresholds. This is encapsulated in the peculiar moment when humans must prove their humanity to a machine. Known as the CAPTCHA test—an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”—this authentication requirement was introduced in the early 2000s as a security measure. Since that time, the demands this test makes on its users have varied from deciphering distorted letters and identifying traffic lights in a grid of blurry photographs, to classifying objects within AI-generated images. Beneath this banal appearance, CAPTCHA tracks the shifting conditions of recognition in the digital age, staging the gap between what life produces and what the system can acknowledge as real.

Taking these considerations as its starting point, the Salzburger Kunstverein’s 2026 program, CAPTCHA Realism, explores the politics of perception and the synthetic constitution of identity. Building on the 2025 curatorial framework Picturing Justice, this new chapter focuses on the figure of the human not as a stable entity but as a project of infrastructural and aesthetic legibility.

Who is allowed to count as human? Within the history of modern art, we have witnessed the multiple intonations of realism, from Courbet’s insistence on making ordinary life visible to Neue Sachlichkeit’s diagnostic edge, to the Nouveaux Réalistes’ residues to Photorealism’s fetish of fidelity, and later to the procedural and evidentiary turns of the 1970s and 1990s. What distinguishes the current condition from its predecessors is not deception but dependence. We have outsourced the authentication of truth to statistical models that require our participation. Each CAPTCHA click both proves and trains; every solved puzzle refines the machine’s ability to see. Authentication becomes a form of labor in what Jonathan Beller calls the “extraction of attention as value” (see: Jonathan Beller, The Message Is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital London: Pluto Press, 2018).

Today our everyday experience of reality feels chaotic, contradictory, and hard to pin down. It exceeds any attempt to represent it fully. At the same time, algorithms strive to limit the world into verifiable data points. The clash of lived reality alongside the poverty of its algorithmic capture gives rise to a realism predicated on absurdity, a realism in which that which is truly real must repeatedly defend itself against allegations of machine origin.

The images used for CAPTCHA tests plot out a threshold between reality and hallucination. They are often synthetically generated or harvested from mapping systems, then algorithmically cropped or duplicated. The results approach what we know as reality, but divergences remain. A horse floats above a suburban intersection; a patch of water mirrors a cloud. The unease these images provoke recalls the “uncanny” described by Freud, that moment when the familiar turns strange. Yet this uncanniness is no longer psychological. It has become infrastructural. It stems from the mismatch between human seeing and machine vision. The CAPTCHA model recognizes patterns we cannot name; we perceive absurdities it cannot detect. The grid reads as a site of negotiation between two orders of cognition. What results is not realism but unrealism, a realism so literal it collapses into nonsense.

Unrealism is the modus vivendi of a society governed by predictive systems. When economic value depends on data capture, the real must be endlessly certified. Platforms demand continuous proof of life: CAPTCHAs, log-ins, two-factor codes, biometric scans. Within this regime, the real is procedural and the absurd is its by-product. With every confirmation, a remainder of uncertainty leaks as anxiety, exposing the mechanics of recognition. The line between the human and the machinic is thus not ontological, but administrative.

The historical distance between Courbet’s Stone Breakers (1849) and today’s CAPTCHA grids measures more than technological change. It traces the displacement of truth from the realm of representation to that of operation. To speak of “CAPTCHA Realism” therefore means to confront a wider infrastructure. These verification tests are not neutral puzzles, but distributed checkpoints of a security economy. They recall, in miniature, the modern passport controls that arose after World War II, bureaucratic rituals that separate citizens from stateless persons. Each misrecognition echoes those earlier injustices, transposed into software. Whether racial, gendered, or geographic, bias in machine vision is not a glitch but rather the latest iteration of realism’s long history of exclusion. The difference is that now the gaze belongs to no one. It is automated, diffuse, and opaque. 

CAPTCHA Realism tells us that we live in a world in which seeing has been replaced by proving. The question it leaves open is the oldest one in the realist tradition: how can we recognize what is true when we no longer control the terms of authentication? In these conditions, perhaps what truly makes us human is our capacity our capacity to perceive the absurd and to recognise, within its distortion, the faint outline of the human still insisting on being seen.

Salzburger Kunstverein’s 2026 exhibition program, CAPTCHA Realism brings together artists, curators, and the publics to examine how thresholds of recognition—whether algorithmic, political, or aesthetic—shape the legibility of identities in a machine-mediated world.

EXHIBITION PROGRAMME 2026

March 7 – November 29, 2026
Kateryna Lysovenko — Ring Gallery

March 7 – May 10, 2026
Linda Lach — Grand Hall
Magdalena Berger — Studio Space

May 23 – July 12, 2026
Agnes Scherer — Grand Hall
freakygreenfish — Studio Space

June 10 & June 12, 2026
Deva Schubert
A new production by Salzburger Kunstverein and SZENE Salzburg, Deva Schubert’s performance lets two bodies and two voices glitch into semantic collapse.

July 25 – September 20, 2026
Ryan Gander — Grand Hall
Hac Vinent — Studio Space

August 5 & August 12th, 2026
Various locations
The Distribution of Luck
Gernot Wieland, Filipka Rutkowska, Harun Morrison, and Urok Shirhan
Co-curated by Mirela Baciak and Denis Maksimov.
Co-produced with International Summer Academy of Fine Arts Salzburg.

October 3  – November 22, 2026
Members Exhibition: HER  — Grand Hall
Curated by Attilia Fattori Franchini.
Peter Schreiner — Studio Space

December 12, 2026  – February 16, 2027
Aline Bouvy — Grand Hall, Studio and Ring Gallery
 

Text: Mirela Baciak
Copyediting & Proofreading: Kate Sutton

Image by Karolina Pietrzyk for Salzburger Kunstverein. © Salzburger Kunstverein.