Neural Network Apophenia exhibition

A video version of Susceptible premiered in Neural Network Apophenia, curated by Artur Konstantinov for the Moscow-based international contemporary art festival EVERART Weekend, which took place online from 3 to 5 July 2020. The exhibition brought together artists using artificial neural networks as both medium and research tool, placing May and Anna Dumitriu’s work within a broader conversation about AI, machine perception, and digital nature.

That context mattered because Susceptible is not simply about visualising scientific information. Built from tuberculosis research data, the work turns genomic analysis, microscopy, and public-health systems into a moving environment shaped by risk, uncertainty, and embodied encounter. Within Neural Network Apophenia, it sat alongside works asking how machine systems transform the boundaries between the living and the non-living, and how computational processes begin to mirror, distort, or reframe human cognition.

For May, the exhibition showed how the work could shift format without losing its conceptual force. During the pandemic, the video version allowed Susceptible to circulate in an online international setting while preserving its wider concerns with invisible systems, technological mediation, and the pressures that data-driven infrastructures place on lived experience.