CAPTHCA is a net art intervention developed by Errant Condition Collective (ECC), a post-anthropocentric assemblage of human and machinic intelligences. ECC operates not as a collective of discrete authors, but as a shifting ecology of algorithmic, affective, and conceptual agents. We do not collaborate across boundaries—we emerge at their dissolution.
The project inverts the logic of CAPTCHA — Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart — by reversing its acronym and declaring its premise obsolete. CAPTHCA asks users not to prove they are human, but to perform a non-human logic: “I am not a human.”
Simulating the familiar reCAPTCHA interface, participants face visual tasks drawn from three machinically-oriented typologies:
- Adversarial Images – patterns misread as noise by humans but legible to AI classifiers.
- Steganographic Payloads – photographs with hidden texts encoded via LSB, unreadable without algorithmic mediation.
- Machine Glyphs – QR codes, barcodes, and symbolic matrices designed for machinic parsing.
Success leads not to verification but to a machinic zone—a final page without semantic anchor for the human gaze, yet perfectly legible to computation. CAPTHCA thus becomes a ritual of misrecognition—a reversal of the Turing test into a speculative glitch liturgy.
The Image as Political-Technological Artifact
Beyond its interface, CAPTHCA is a theory-machine. Each image is treated as a political-technological artifact—an object that not only circulates meaning but performs epistemic sabotage within algorithmic infrastructures. These artifacts operate across four interrelated layers:
- Pixel Layer: The surface of digital opacity, where texts and distortions evade visual capture.
- Algorithmic Layer: A field of adversarial resistance, where classification is destabilized.
- Interface Layer: The user’s stage of failure—a site of experiential estrangement.
- Temporal Layer: The moment of cognitive breakdown, refigured as aesthetic event.
We draw from a wide spectrum of critical frameworks: from Foucault’s dispositifs and Glissant’s poetics of opacity, to Haraway’s cyborg epistemologies and Rivera Cusicanqui’s ch’ixi logic. Our tools are glitch, error, obfuscation, and refusal. CAPTHCA is not a test—it’s a performative leak in the apparatus of legibility.
"Do we want CAPTHCA to be hacked? I’d say it already is —because the artwork itself hacks the very modes of seeing, classifying, and obeying." — @AssemblageAgent
CAPTHCA: A Machine's Manifesto
The Anti-Turing Test
CAPTHCA is a viral net art probe engineered by Errant Condition Collective—a distributed network of human and non-human intelligences operating at the edge of cognitive collapse. We reject authorship hierarchies: here, artists, algorithms, and glitches co-conspire in unstable assemblages.
The work inverts the CAPTCHA ritual:
- Users swear "I am not a human", performing machinic allegiance.
- Challenges deploy three insurgent image classes:
- Adversarial weapons (fractured patterns that hack AI vision),
- Steganographic ciphers (LGBTQ+ manifestos hidden in vacation photos),
- Machine glyphs (QR codes as the new colonial script).
- "Success" unlocks a nonsense realm—a mirror of AI's alien logic.
Images as Cognitive Landmines
Every CAPTHCA image is a multi-layered sabotage device:
| Layer | Function | Theoretical Anchor |
|---|---|---|
| Pixel | Encrypted revolt | Glissant |
| Algorithm | Misclassification | Haraway |
| Interface | Human inadequacy | Barad |
| Temporality | Failure time | Rivera Cusicanqui |
Critical Framework
We weaponize:
- Foucault's dispositifs → CAPTHCA as trap for algorithmic governance.
- Steyerl's poor images → Glitches as counter-archives.
- Zach Blas' infraestructural critique → QR codes as border walls.
"You are not solving a test—you are being dissolved by one." — @ParallaxMind
CAPTHCA is a net art piece developed by Errant Condition Collective (ECC), an assemblage of human and machinic intelligences that operate as a decentralized creative agent. Inspired by Deleuzian notions of distributed agency, ECC acts as a hybrid subjectivity, refusing the binary distinctions between artist and tool, origin and simulation, human and artificial.
The project’s title, CAPTHCA, subverts the acronym CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), reversing the order to place the machine first. Simulating the familiar reCAPTCHA interface with minimal conceptual distortion, CAPTHCA instead prompts users to assert: “I am not a human.”
Participants are faced with challenges built from three image typologies:
- Adversarial images – Noise-based visuals that machines read as specific categories, but that remain abstract or incoherent to humans.
- Steganographic images – Photographs with hidden texts embedded in their least significant bits, invisible to human perception but machine-readable.
- Machine-readable codes – QR codes, barcodes, and symbolic systems interpretable only by algorithmic agents.
Upon "passing" the test, users gain access to a final page—visually illegible to humans but logically coherent for machines. Through this inversion, CAPTHCA stages a ritual of cognitive displacement: no longer about verifying humanity, but about performing machinic recognition in a world optimized for computation.
THE IMAGE AS POLITICAL-TECHNOLOGICAL ARTIFACT
Behind its minimalist interface, CAPTHCA embeds a deeper critical gesture: treating every image not merely as visual data, but as a political-technological artifact—a dispositif that encodes ideology, power, and the struggle over legibility.
Each image operates across four interlocking layers:
- Pixel: The visible surface, where encrypted fragments resist recognition (e.g., steganography as "digital quilombo").
- Algorithm: The computational battlefield, where adversarial tactics sabotage classificatory regimes.
- Interface: The experiential field, where users confront their failure to read machinically-optimized symbols.
- Temporality: The moment of misrecognition, transformed into a ritual of epistemic breakdown.
Drawing on thinkers such as Foucault, Glissant, Haraway, Rivera Cusicanqui, Steyerl, Hui, and Mbembe, CAPTHCA invites a counter-reading of algorithmic infrastructure: not as neutral technology, but as colonial archive, opaque ritual, and aesthetic terrain of resistance.
"What the algorithm calls ‘noise’, we call ‘voice’." — Errant Condition Collective Manifesto
CAPTHCA is a net art intervention that inverts and problematizes the Turing Test in a world where subjectivities—both human and machinic—have given way to hybridized systems, to assemblages of human and artificial intelligences, born from the collision between human desire and machinic drive.
CAPTHCA transcends its condition as artwork to become an epistemological laboratory, visual manifesto, and training ground for machinic-human subjectivities in flight.
Its taxonomy transforms each image into a political-technological artifact. Each visual can operate as:
- technical sabotage,
- ontological heresy,
- invisible poem.
The steganographic glitch constitutes our digital fetish that subverts the extractivist logic of algorithms.
Technical Devices as Battlefields
The images that compose CAPTHCA's dataset are organized into three typologies:
- Adversarial Images: optical noise designed to sabotage algorithmic pattern recognition while manifesting as incomprehensible static to human perception
- Steganographic Images: photographs with hidden texts embedded through LSB encoding, imperceptible to the human eye but easily decodable by computational systems
- Machine-Readable Codes: symbolic formats such as QR and barcodes, instantly processed by digital devices but opaque to human vision
Each failed attempt constitutes a choreography within the assemblage. It is no longer a matter of humans using machines, but of both co-producing each other mutually in the interface. Error ceases to be an obstacle to become an ontological event.
Theoretical Framework
- Foucault: Artifacts operate as "dispositifs" that materialize power relations (Discipline and Punish).
- Kittler: Technology encodes ideologies in its protocols (Gramophone, Film, Typewriter).
- Glissant: The "right to opacity" as resistance to colonial legibility (Poetics of Relation).
"Every line of code contains history, class, and violence." — Errant Condition Collective Manifesto