Profile

Profile 2025/2026 – single-channel video, 3840×2160, 10 seconds, looped

Synthetic coded records of crisis calls, welfare checks, detentions, admissions, discharges, across a period of time. Patterned on the way mental health gets logged, somewhere, by someone, across two anonymised years. Never a specific person, or event, only the shape a system uses to file it…What fills the little that remains legible of the painted ground is unresolved, a suggestion of an individual. The code doesn’t cover the head. It runs a passage across it the way a redaction moves through a document rather than over it. A profile is supposed to be the most legible view of a person; it’s also the term for what a data system builds of one, whether its subject agrees to it or not.

Some technology accounts describes this exact mismatch: judgement quietly handed to systems built to pattern-match, not to understand, with the real danger sitting in mistaking one for the other. Mimi Onuoha’s work on the data that goes uncollected supplies the other half of it, what a system like this can’t hold is often the part that mattered. No category marked “incident” or “response” was ever going to carry what any of it cost anyone.