THE BLACK FLY 2026

A BLACK FLY / MÄKÄRÄINEN 2025

Year
2025, 2026

Author
Laura Beloff & Jürgis Peters

Image credits: Beloff and/or Peters 2025, 2026

The Black Fly (Beloff & Peters 2025, 2026) - Installation with interactive generative AI.

The work was originally developed for a group exhibition project in Imatra, Finland. The first version was set up in an abandoned hotel room in the very center of the town in August 2025. In October - December 2026 the second version of the work is exhibited in Riga, Latvia in the Climate Imagination exhibition at the gallery of the Latvian National Library.

IMATRA: Imatra is a small town in southeastern Finland, situated on the border with Russia. This bordertown is known for its waterways and water power plant that was, in history, a state of the art facility. Today, with the finnish-russian border being closed, the town is suffering from economic depression and, also, there has emerged an ecological problem of small human biting black flies. Environmentalists have suggested that the problem may be linked to changes made to the riverbanks approximately 70 years ago during the construction of the power plant. These modifications destroyed many of the habitats of predatory insects that helped keep the black fly population under control. The black fly, often dismissed as an unpleasant pest or parasite, becomes a focus for questions of presence, perception and societal developments.

THE BLACK FLY: In this interactive AI-generated video work, the boundary between the real and the artificial is emphasized through the manipulation of a visitor’s image; making the visitors themselves to gradually change to become a fly. This change is made not by biology but by digital code. The visitors are urged to consider their own hybridity; being partly organism, partly data, that are today increasingly entangled. In this installation, the black fly is no longer just an insect. It is a technological mutation of a real creature, generated by a machine trained to imitate life and evolution.

This work plays with the discomfort of artificial life. Artificiality here is a process: a mirror that refracts rather than reflects. The installation points out that reality is never stable but evolving and our future is possibly recombinant. THE BLACK FLY installation invites visitors to witness themselves converging with the another organism. In this case the focus is on what is often considered as the unwanted and nasty part of natural ecosystem. The work points questions to a formation of a kinship: not grounded in empathy, but in entanglement within bio-technological ecologies.

The version exhibited in Riga was improved version of generative imgage technology, and also the physical sphere was larger than in the first version.

SOUND in Imatra: The first version of theinstallation shown in Imatra featured also an interactive sound component. Visitors were invited to open a jar (a decorative metal coffee pot in the images) presented in the exhibition. Inside the jar, a swarm of flies is ‘contained’; when the lid is opened, the flies are released into the space as sound. This triggered soundscape is designed to be unsettling, evoking discomfort or tension. The opening and closing the lid will function as an on/off mechanism for the sound. The space will be equipped with speaker-system.

This work is an experiment in using generative AI that is not smooth and pleasing but rather trying to create feelings of fear and disgust in the visitors.

Technology used in the work is a result of Jürgis Peters's doctoral research.