Contemporary society is undergoing a profound transformation driven by artificial intelligence (AI). With its capacity for self-regulation and adaptive learning, AI permeates social structures and daily life, reshaping human subjectivity. Whereas the industrial era produced alienation through machinery, the AI era replaces subordination with complex collaboration and role migration. As human actions are absorbed into algorithmic prediction, perception and cognition risk becoming homogenised, posing challenges to autonomy.

Beyond the Machine responds to these conditions through artistic practice, exploring AI’s impact on human-machine relations, artistic creation, and everyday life. The exhibition features five works: Dialectics of Survival addresses security crises and algorithmic discrimination; Moral Machine examines AI’s empiricist approach to ethics and cultural understanding; Indexing Undercurrents extends the Horizon — Sea series to probe search-engine biases; Universal Deputy imagines extreme scenarios of surveillance, social media, and AI citizenship; and Mutable Sentry embeds machine agency within each work, highlighting inter-AI collaboration and modes of perception.

Amid the digitisation of life, calculation and prediction have become the singular motor of consumerism, diminishing human imaginative capacity and reducing subjects to machines of desire. This exhibition insists on the need for heterogeneous forms of thought to resist such algorithmic capture.