The Host’s Blind Spot: Parasite Logic

Peter Hungerford

A system encounters the human archive.
Images are ingested, reorganised, and held in suspension.
What remains is not memory as it was lived,
but memory as it is processed.

Host Blind Spot is a body of work combining video, generative systems, photography, and material experiments to examine how non-human processing reshapes memory, identity, and place.

Overview

Host Blind Spot explores how systems ingest existing material and reconfigure it according to internal logics that do not align with human intention or interpretation. Drawing on Michel Serres’ notion of the parasite, the work treats artificial intelligence not as an agent or tool, but as a disruptive process that alters what it passes through.

Personal photographs, bodies, architectural spaces, and physical materials act as host surfaces. Once absorbed, they are reorganised, distorted, or fixed into new forms. Meaning is not erased, but displaced.

Selected Works (Documentation

What the Host Forgets

 (Best seen in full screen)

Personal photographic material processed through system-driven drift and reorganisation.

A moving image work tracing how memory shifts when processed by a logic that does not remember in human terms.

Projected video created together with AiI based on the artists photographs.

Signal Host

(a recording of what will be a live system output. Best seen in full screen)

The operational core of the project: a system that continues to run regardless of attention, producing persistent signal patterns rather than narrative outputs.

Live generative system (Python/Tkinter) using data on AI usage, good and bad.

Material Residues

(Click to expand images)

Digital processes fixed into physical form. Once fluid operations are arrested, enclosed, and made resistant to revision.

Resin and pigment, 15 cm; Pigment prints, 60 × 40 cm.

Artist Statement

Echoing Michel Serres’ notion of the parasite, The Host’s Blind Spot explores the extent to which artificial intelligence performs a parasitic mimicry, inhabiting the image, interrupting, rewriting, and eroding the archive. The work perceives the parasite not as a threat, but as a vital participant in exchange, each work becomes a negotiation between signal and interference, between host and system.

The work resists straightforward explanation: text flickers; portraits breathe; fragments dissolve. Each short looped fragment pairs subtle visual shifts with restrained soundscapes, creating a rhythm that hovers between recognition and loss. These are not illustrations of technology but enactments of interference, where memory and identity become unstable, and where presence flickers at the edge of disappearance. 

Rather than offering resolution, the series asks viewers to dwell in the intervals: in the blind spots where systems of vision and meaning falter.

About the Work

Host Blind Spot examines how non-human systems ingest existing material and reorganise it according to internal logics that do not align with human intention or interpretation. Drawing on Michel Serres’ concept of the parasite, the project approaches artificial intelligence not as an autonomous agent, but as a disruptive process that feeds on, alters, and leaves traces within the structures it encounters.

The work spans generative video systems, photography, and material experiments, using personal archives, bodies, and architectural spaces as host surfaces. Rather than erasing meaning, these processes displace it, producing outcomes that persist as residue rather than narrative.

Extended reflection on process, theory, and development is presented in the Shorthand narrative

Michel Serres, The Parasite, 1980 / 2007.
Translated by Lawrence R. Schehr. University of Minnesota Press.

Exhibitions

🚪Door 1 –Enter the Field

The exhibition space

A non-linear environment of images, fragments, and latent connections.

🚪Door 2 — Interpretive companion

Read the Companion – Context, reflections, and points of entry

A narrative thread that sits alongside the exhibition

🚪Door 3 — Orientation / safety net

View the Map -Index of works and zones

A navigational overview for reference

Explore the exhibition space, overview of works, and extended reflections — designed as one integrated system

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Existing exhibitions – earlier and parallel presentations of The Host’s Blind Spot

Enter the digital exhibition: Kunstmatrix – best seen on a large screen

This exhibition is experienced as a space rather than a sequence.
There is no prescribed route. Move slowly, pause, and allow the works to reveal themselves over time.
Some elements respond to proximity; others remain latent until you choose to engage with them.
If navigation feels unfamiliar, this is intentional: it reflects the underlying logic of host, parasite, and interference explored throughout the work.

Read the extended narrative: Shorthand – best seen on a large screen

This Shorthand story acts as a companion to The Host’s Blind Spot.
It does not document the exhibition, nor does it explain it away.
Instead, it offers a set of reflections, fragments, and points of entry that sit alongside the visual work.
You may read this before, during, or after visiting the exhibition space.
There is no fixed order — only moments of alignment, interference, and drift.

(Scroll down to see content)

View the proposed physical exhibition: Kunstmatrix mock-up – best seen on a large screen

Timeline & Exhibition Intent

Timeline & Exhibition Intent

2024–2025
Development of Host Blind Spot as a multi-part project combining generative video systems, photography, and material experiments. Core works include Signal Host, What the Host Forgets, and a series of resin-based material residues.

2025
Presentation of the project as a digital exhibition using Kunstmatrix, supported by an extended narrative and reflective framework developed in Shorthand. Publication of a catalogue documenting selected works, process, and contextual notes.

Proposed
Exploration of Host Blind Spot as a physical exhibition, translated from its digital form into a spatial layout. A Kunstmatrix mock-up has been developed to test scale, adjacency, and material presence, and to communicate feasibility for potential future exhibition contexts.

Notes on intent

The digital exhibition constitutes the primary realised form of the project. The physical exhibition mock-up is presented as a speculative translation rather than a finalised proposal, and functions as a planning and communication tool.

Documentation

Catalogue (PDF)
Selected works, images, and contextual notes.