Black Box‍

exhibited at: 
→ panke.gallery ←
→ Aksioma | Project Space ←
‍
Black Box is a manifestation of total algorithmically driven curation, encapsulated in the form of a video game. The intermedia installation codes between the physical and virtual realm, tasking players with exploring the inner workings of a deconstructed recommender system that forms, facilitates and amplifies online identities. In a political environment where the overton window is drastically shifting, the complex relations of different ideologies and identity positions can be difficult to fully grasp. The inherent ability of capital to immediately co-opt any radical thought, politics or cultural expression and encode it in its own axiomatics generates fragmented and niche political identities that generally express their ideological beliefs through aesthetic forms [1]. These are often personalized or augmented individual mods downloaded and installed from the massive library of the database. The database as a model of cultural production and consumption imposes ceaseless recombination, memeing, parodying and remixing of content aggregated and obsessively organized in online threads and wikis [2]. Faced with the influx of paradoxical belief systems in a digital economy of post-truth, a turn towards aesthetics is the only sensible one [3]. If every online interaction is purely performative and post-ironic, memes become the fundamental carriers of meaning, assembled through iconology, propagated by online echo chambers and harnessed as function [4]. Black Box is a project deeply rooted in these online communities and memetic dialects, often appearing as if to be in direct conversation with them. It carefully and precisely maps out the current online aesthetic ecosystem and lets the player roam free, learning about and engaging with different distinct types of character builds that algorithmic culture imposes upon our IRL selves. The player will chart out this dense memetic landscape by feeding themselves to different filter bubbles and interacting with diverging pills, creating an aesthetic representation of their internet-mediated worldview. Based on their decisions, interests and exploration the player will be awarded their own custom wojak – a quintessential symbol of the slowly dying deep vernacular web. Black Box is thus a critical, faithful and attentive look into the workings of aesthetic dimensions and manifestations of the online contemporary.