Elisa Giardina Papa for Digital Delights and Disturbances
On November 12, 2025, John Cabot University welcomed artist Elisa Giardina Papa for a lecture on AI, labor and incomputable data. The event marked the third installment of the Fall 2025 Digital Delights and Disturbances (DDD) series, organized and sponsored by JCU’s Department of Communication and Media Studies.
In her talk, Giardina Papa outlined theoretical and archival research that influenced two of her video installations, Technology of Care and Cleaning Emotional Data. She addressed the ways in which machines are disciplined and trained to see the images she collected while working as a “data cleaner” for various AI systems.
The Art of the Incomputable
Working across Artificial intelligence-based projects, large-scale video installations, experimental films, and writing, Giardina Papa draws attention to those aspects of our lives that remain radically incomputable.
“For me, the incomputable is not simply what machines cannot yet process,” explained the artist. “What remains incomputable in AI’s attempts to quantify emotion and care, then, is not only their complexity but the very worlds and ways of being that refuse classification.”
Her artistic process is grounded in archival and dataset research. “I am interested in what these archives exclude as much as what they preserve,” said Giardina Papa. “The gaps, distortions, and erasures become generative places.”
Cleaning Emotional Data: AI’s Grammar of Emotions
In Giardina Papa’s installation Cleaning Emotional Data, “cleaning” stands for both technical procedure and biopolitical demand. “The project emerged directly from the period in which I worked as a data cleaner for several ‘human-in-the-loop’ companies providing training datasets for machine-vision systems,” said the artist. “During that time, I performed hundreds of micro-tasks designed to produce a consistent ground truth: labeling and verifying ‘correct’ emotional expressions so that interior states could be technologically extracted from the face.”
What became clear to Giardina Papa is that data cleaning is also about enforcing a “grammar of emotions,” and disciplining the AI machine so that it conforms to supposedly universal categories. This process revealed how emotion recognition depends on “epistemological flattening,” which means reducing complex and culturally specific forms of feeling into discrete data that can be computed by AI.
“Cleaning thus becomes an emotional operation,” explained Giardina Papa. “Both because it hinges on judgments about affect and because it filters out whatever does not align — any smile that is ‘not happy enough,’ any expression that fails to read correctly. It foregrounds the violence involved — messy and disorderly feelings are disciplined so that they can be made legible within AI’s orderly quest.”
Technologies of Care and Emotional Surrogacy
Elisa Giardina Papa
Giardina Papa’s Technologies of Care project was inspired by conversations the artist had with people working as online caregivers — such as ASMR artists, fetish video performers, dating coaches, fans-for-hire, and virtual assistants — who provide customized affective services through global platforms. The work highlights how these platforms make labor anonymous: workers are reorganized into interchangeable packets of time that can be activated based on demand.
“One conversation that helped clarify this system was with a worker involved in the Invisible Boyfriend app,” said Giardina Papa. “Although marketed as an automated companion, the service depended on a dispersed group of microworkers — mostly women — who collectively sustained the illusion of a single attentive partner. Their emotional labor remained hidden, allowing care to appear as an automated service while concealing the people who enabled it.”
This dynamic can be described as “technological surrogacy,” an arrangement in which human workers perform emotional labor on behalf of so-called “intelligent” machines, while those machines are imagined as surrogates for forms of care work. “Technologies of Care tends to this tension, recognizing the real affective exchanges that occur while highlighting the economic and technical arrangements that keep this labor obscured,” said Giardina Papa.
Elisa Giardina Papa is an artist and Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Her work has been exhibited at the Biennale di Venezia, the Museum of Modern Art in Rome, the Whitney Museum, Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin, ICA and Frieze London, BFI London Film Festival, Vienna Secession, Buenos Aires Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento, Seoul Mediacity Biennale, the Center for Contemporary Art Tashkent, Uzbekistan, M+ Hong Kong, and more. Her latest art book, Leaking Subjects and Bounding Boxes: On Training Ai (Sorry Press, 2022), documents the methods currently used to teach Artificial intelligence to capture, classify, and order the world and presents a collection of images that exceed computation. She holds a PhD in Film and Media from the University of California, Berkeley, and has previously held positions at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and the Rhode Island School of Design.
