A BLACK FLY / MÄKÄRÄINEN 2025

Year
2025

Author
Laura Beloff & Jürgis Peters

Image credits are: Beloff and/or Peters 2025

A Black Fly (Beloff & Peters 2025)

Installation with interactive generative AI, sound, and video projection. The work was originally developed for a group exhibition project in Imatra, Finland. It was set up in an abandoned hotel room in the center of the town. Imatra has developed over time a problem of having black files in the city. This has been speculated by the environmentalists to be due to changes done for the river banks in the past.

Generative AI: The black fly, often dismissed as an unpleasant pest or parasite, becomes a focus for questions of presence and perception. In this interactive AI-generated video work, the boundary between the real and the artificial is emphasized through the manipulation of a visitor’s image; making the visitors themselves to gradually change to become a fly. This change is made not by biology but by digital code. The visitors are urged to consider their own hybridity; being partly organism, partly data, that are today increasingly entangled. In this installation, the black fly is no longer just an insect. It is a technological mutation of a real creature, generated by a machine trained to imitate life and evolution.

This work plays with the discomfort of artificial life. Artificiality here is a process: a mirror that refracts rather than reflects. The installation points out that reality is never stable but evolving and our future is possibly recombinant. Becoming A BLACK FLY installation invites visitors to witness themselves reimagined through a nonhuman lens. In this case the focus is on the unwanted and nasty part of natural ecosystem. The work points questions to a formation of a kinship: not grounded in empathy, but in entanglement within bio-technological ecologies.

Sound: The installation features an interactive sound component. Visitors are invited to open a jar presented in the exhibition. Inside the jar, a swarm of flies is ‘contained’; when the lid is opened, the flies are released into the space as sound. This triggered soundscape is designed to be unsettling, evoking discomfort or tension. The opening and closing the lid will function as an on/off mechanism for the sound. The space will be equipped with speaker-system.

This work was an experiment in using generative AI that is not smooth and pleasing but rather trying to create feelings of fear and disgust in the visitors.