Is free really free? That's the question Fotoautomatica puts to anyone who walks up to it. The installation exists to expose the actual cost of the services and software we treat as costless — the quiet trade we make every day without reading the terms. Built during the AI project module at Hochschule München in a team of four, with my work centered on ideation and art direction, the piece was our answer to a simple brief: create a spatial installation that visualizes the opportunities or dangers of AI in the years ahead. We chose the danger.

Before designing anything, we needed to understand how people actually experience data collection — or fail to notice it at all. Using "how might we" questions, we shaped the themes the installation would carry: how AI is perceived, the unease that comes from having your privacy quietly breached, and the true price of "free" software. We ran expert interviews alongside conversations with ordinary people, trying to gauge how visible data harvesting really is in everyday life. As one member of the Chaos Computer Club put it, the personality profiles the major platforms have built over decades reach a level of detail the Stasi never could have dreamed of. That gap between what's being gathered and what people notice became the heart of the piece.

The form we landed on is a photo booth — a familiar object loaded with exactly the right symbolism. It promises privacy while asking for total surrender, and at the exhibition it drew visitors in with the oldest offer in the book: a free snapshot. But we designed it to look like an artifact recovered from a future dystopia. The aesthetic is deliberately unsettling, a visual warning about a world of unchecked AI surveillance, and the discomfort is the point.

What comes out of the booth is not the photo you expect. The built-in AI reads your appearance in real time — age, origin, perceived flaws — and, through ChatGPT, generates a fictional, prejudiced character profile that prints out in place of your picture, presented as a kind of invoice. Even the typography does the work: each letter's weight is set to match the brightness of the image at that point, so the text of your fabricated story literally renders your portrait. The story becomes the image.

Fotoautomatica came together at its vernissage, where visitors got a tangible sense of the risks that already exist rather than the ones we imagine are still far off. In hindsight, a final debrief for each visitor and a follow-up survey gathering concrete suggestions would have given the project a deeper, more reflective layer — a thread worth pulling if the installation ever has a second life.