Uncanny Algorithms: Karla Gruss Explores the Ghosts in the Machine

In Uncanny Algorithms, German graphic designer and photographer Karla Gruss invites viewers into a haunting digital realm where artificial intelligence, human identity, and natural environments collide. Based in New York, Gruss draws from her dual background in photography and graphic design to examine the eerie distortions born from the entanglement of machine learning and corporeal form. The result is a striking research-driven project that challenges our perception of what it means to be human in a digitally mediated world.

Uncanny Algorithms is an exploration of AI’s malfunctions—its failures, glitches, and moments of aesthetic collapse. Gruss intentionally embraces these imperfections, transforming them into unsettling yet oddly familiar visual narratives. The project’s centerpiece is a 70-page book, divided into 20 pages of self-authored theoretical research and 50 pages of AI-generated visual compositions. In these visuals, grotesque, fragmented digital bodies are embedded into serene natural landscapes, creating a surreal tension between the organic and the artificial.

Karla Gruss’s work channels the disorienting energy of Francis Bacon’s portraits, but reinterpreted through the lens of generative algorithms. Her digital figures exist in a liminal space—caught between hyperrealism and abstraction, coherence and error. This tension reflects broader cultural anxieties about the role of technology in shaping identity and the human experience.

Through critical analysis and evocative design, Uncanny Algorithms dissects AI’s influence on our understanding of realism, the body, and perception. Gruss draws compelling parallels between the logic of AI and the human subconscious: both rely on pattern recognition, abstraction, and dreamlike associations to generate meaning. Like the surrealists before her, she sees value in the illogical, the bizarre, and the unpredictable—transforming technological limitations into fertile ground for creative exploration.

What emerges is more than a critique of AI; it is a meditation on the contemporary condition. In Gruss’s vision, the uncanny is not just a byproduct of machine error—it is a defining characteristic of our era, where the digital and the physical, the real and the imagined, are increasingly entangled. With Uncanny Algorithms, Karla Gruss doesn’t just question what it means to be a body in the digital age—she reimagines it entirely.

Uncanny Algorithms: Karla Gruss Explores the Ghosts in the Machine

In Uncanny Algorithms, German graphic designer and photographer Karla Gruss invites viewers into a haunting digital realm where artificial intelligence, human identity, and natural environments collide. Based in New York, Gruss draws from her dual background in photography and graphic design to examine the eerie distortions born from the entanglement of machine learning and corporeal form. The result is a striking research-driven project that challenges our perception of what it means to be human in a digitally mediated world.

Uncanny Algorithms is an exploration of AI’s malfunctions—its failures, glitches, and moments of aesthetic collapse. Gruss intentionally embraces these imperfections, transforming them into unsettling yet oddly familiar visual narratives. The project’s centerpiece is a 70-page book, divided into 20 pages of self-authored theoretical research and 50 pages of AI-generated visual compositions. In these visuals, grotesque, fragmented digital bodies are embedded into serene natural landscapes, creating a surreal tension between the organic and the artificial.

Karla Gruss’s work channels the disorienting energy of Francis Bacon’s portraits, but reinterpreted through the lens of generative algorithms. Her digital figures exist in a liminal space—caught between hyperrealism and abstraction, coherence and error. This tension reflects broader cultural anxieties about the role of technology in shaping identity and the human experience.

Through critical analysis and evocative design, Uncanny Algorithms dissects AI’s influence on our understanding of realism, the body, and perception. Gruss draws compelling parallels between the logic of AI and the human subconscious: both rely on pattern recognition, abstraction, and dreamlike associations to generate meaning. Like the surrealists before her, she sees value in the illogical, the bizarre, and the unpredictable—transforming technological limitations into fertile ground for creative exploration.

What emerges is more than a critique of AI; it is a meditation on the contemporary condition. In Gruss’s vision, the uncanny is not just a byproduct of machine error—it is a defining characteristic of our era, where the digital and the physical, the real and the imagined, are increasingly entangled. With Uncanny Algorithms, Karla Gruss doesn’t just question what it means to be a body in the digital age—she reimagines it entirely.