TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

The long-term project ERBSENZÄHLER (Pea Counter) positions the pea as a liminal being—transitioning between semi-living seed and plant, object of investigation and living entity—within a techno-industrial system. The project consists of a series of sorting machines, with peas serving as model organisms to reflect on biopolitical mechanisms of classification and discrimination.
The installation EZ Quality Sorter exemplifies this by inviting visitors to visually inspect and pre-sort peas, with their decisions later guiding the machine’s automated process. Over time, the machine transitions to fully automated sorting based on user input.
By merging human judgment and algorithmic automation, the installation raises broader questions about the delegation of life-and-death decisions to machines. It challenges the perceived neutrality of automated systems, revealing their dependence on subjective human biases, and critiques the reduction of complex living systems to rigid binaries.