Since the early 2000s, artist Mika Tajima has explored individual agency within the systems of power that shape social spaces. Many of her projects examine how bodies, emotions, and behaviors are conditioned by professional and technological environments.

Her Human Synth series simulates swirling plumes of smoke based on messages posted by a city's inhabitants—in this case, Paris—on the social network Twitter. Originally collected in real time, this data was analyzed to create an emotional portrait of the city. From these findings, an algorithm attempted to predict shifts in the collective mood, visually represented by the changing forms of the generated smoke.

The oxymoron that gives the work its title, Human Synth, situates it at the intersection of individual expression and its technological processing—highlighting the tension inherent in mass exploitation of personal data by digital capitalism’s major players. At the same time, Tajima’s work echoes the ancient practice of capnomancy, in which civilizations from Mesopotamia to Malaysia to Greece sought to interpret the future through the study of smoke.

Tajima’s synthesized wisps of smoke generate predictions that remain cryptic to the viewer. The echoes of metropolises—Tokyo, Istanbul, Los Angeles, or Paris—fuel an elusive, machine-driven improvisation, transforming the noise of the world into a calculated silence.

Philippe Bettinelli, 2025
Translated by Laurie Hurwitz