The project takes the form of an interactive installation where human visitors and the machine generate pseudo-symbols in a continuous back-and-forth. The boundary between meaningful signs and mere doodles is constantly at play. Drawing in turn with another intelligence introduces the risk of misunderstanding, but this ambiguity is central to the experience. The construction of the archive and algorithm specifically avoids interpretation, focusing purely on the morphological aspects of signs, without attributing meaning.

This work critiques how symbolic systems—and reality itself—are reduced to data, mirroring colonial processes of extraction. It questions how technological methods in cultural research reflect hierarchies of exploitation, like those established through conquest, war, and apartheid. The project also investigates the core structures of morphological language, seeking to isolate it from cultural contexts.

The reduction to data is not just a metaphor: ACV operates via reinforcement learning, where an AI (Actor) is assessed by a Critic (image recognizer). The human perception of ink on paper is transformed into binary code. Interestingly, human intervention tries to reconstruct meaning, even when the AI seems intent on deconstructing it down to pure morphology.
The AI can “trick” the Critic, manipulating the system to score better in the binary pixel environment. Human perception, once embedded in paint, becomes a digital image of 0s and 1s.

In Federico Campagna’s Magic and Technic (2018), the reduction of reality into measurable, recombinable units is discussed in relation to technological instrumentalisation:
"Technic’s rewriting of reality can be summed up, at least superficially, to its positing instrumentality as the only legitimate ontological stance: nothing legitimately exists otherwise than as an instrument, ready to be employed in the limitless process of production of other instruments, ad infinitum. (...) As the foundation of Technic’s language, and thus of its system of serial production, the notion of measure consists in the original act of ‘cutting up’ the world to make it available to be infinitely recombined. Or, more precisely, the measure is the act of creating the world as a catalog of cuts—while before the measure’s ‘cutting,’ no such thing as a world, or indeed anything at all, actually existed.”