Haley Morris-Cafiero $What Does an Ideal Employee Look Like?

Saturday 25 October 2025 18:00
Friday 5 December 2025 16:00

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Haley Morris-Cafiero, Ideal Detail Oriented Employee (2025)

What Does an Ideal Employee Look Like? employs humour, performance and AI to visualise the biases hidden in algorithms that power employment applicant assessment software used by many major corporations. Applicants "interview" with the software as it analyses their physical features and provides a score of desirable employee personality characteristics. The software's algorithms are biased and assess potential applicants with large eyes as being “more honest” or those with high cheekbones as “better leaders”.

To challenge the common corporate use of this discriminatory software, the artist collaborated with a computer scientist to recreate the AI driven software, enabling her to do performances of job interviews while she manipulated her face to achieve high ideal employee personality scores. As she changes the shape of her face and its components, the videos document changing scores as the software assesses her for one of twenty personality traits that are ideal for employers.

Traits include agreeableness, openness, or extraversion, and are further broken down into subcategories such as leadership skills and competitiveness amongst others. Once she has achieved the highest score for each category, she freezes her face by securing its position with tape. She then captured the result as a parody workplace headshot portrait.

www.haleymorriscafiero.com

This exhibition is presented as part of Press the Shutter, Type the Prompt: Photography & Truth in Times of AI, organised by Goran Gaber, Andrew Cusworth, and Anne-Sophie Gabillas within the Channels of Digital Scholarship initiative by the Maison Française d’Oxford and Digital Scholarship @Oxford. It brings together international artists who explore generative AI as a tool, a narrative device, a critical lens, and a poetic medium — revealing fresh possibilities at the intersection of art, technology, and storytelling.

https://mfo.web.ox.ac.uk
https://digitalscholarship.web.ox.ac.uk

Part performer, part artist, part provocateur, Haley Morris-Cafiero uses her photography as an activist voice to fight discrimination and social invisibility. Morris-Cafiero’s work has been widely exhibited in solo and group exhibitions around the world, and has been featured in numerous publications including the Guardian, Le Monde, The New York Times and Salon. An Associate Professor and Subject Leader of Visual Arts at De Montfort University, she holds a MFA from the University of Arizona, and earned her practice-based PhD from Westminster University in 2023. Nominated for the Prix Pictet in 2014, the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize in 2021, and shortlisted for the 2025 BMW Art Makers Award, Morris-Cafiero’s first monograph, The Watchers, was published in 2015, while her second, The Bully Pulpit, was published in 2019. Morris-Cafiero’s work is also featured in the 2021 publication, Photography – A Feminist History, by Emma Lewis published by Tate. Originally born in Atlanta, Georgia, Morris-Cafiero lives in the United Kingdom.