Spot On – Interactive Art Installation by Stefan Szeider
Spot On is an interactive art installation, created by Stefan Szeider, that was exhibited at the Ars Electronica Festival 2026 (Negotiating Humanity), September 9-13, 2026, in Linz, Austria.
Spot On asks a simple and uneasy question: how does it feel when a machine claims to know you? In a brightly lit white room, a single bar stool faces a camera. A monitor shows visitors their own mirrored image and invites them to pose. The moment someone sits on this stool, a calm voice comes from the speaker next to the camera and delivers a live psychological reading. Who is this person? What do they feel? What do they want? The readings are generated in real time by a multimodal AI model that receives the camera feed and is spoken aloud to the whole room. The voice never hesitates and is always certain. It enacts the authority that we attribute to AI systems that promise to know the truth. That authority is contested, yet we use these systems without reservation. The machine is confident, intimate, but often wrong. Spot On confronts visitors with their own wish to be seen and truthfully understood, as well as with the issue of confabulation emerging from AI systems.
Links
- Spot On in the Ars Electronica Festival 2026 programme
- Spot On on the Ars Electronica website
- Our worldview. Our view of humanity. Our reality. Ars Electronica Blog, August 26, 2026
- Teaser video on YouTube
Impressions from the festival
