“TWIFSY (The world is fine, save yourself)”
Title:
- TWIFSY (The world is fine, save yourself)
Artist(s) and People Involved:
Exhibiting Artist(s):
Symposium:
Venue(s):
Artist Statement:
TWIFSY (The world is fine, save yourself) is a media art installation designed to stimulate thought about how urban life, which is increasingly mediated by opaque black boxes and artificial intelligence algorithms, may one day manifest in the future Smart City, where time and space have collapsed into a dystopic post-human virtual world. TWIFSY is concerned with the implications of the current sociotechnical paradigm of surveillance capitalism – the automatised monopolistic power and control over Big Data by Big Tech and the transformation of personal information, including human needs, mobility, beliefs, thoughts, and expressions into a capital commodity.
The creative practice uses speculative design methods to initiate a debate for preferable futures over the undesirable and destructive market-driven forces of the past and present to inspire change before the future happens. TWIFSY evolved as a thought experiment that speaks to the speculative cultures of science-fiction, futurism, literature, politics, and film, offering citizens a space to free their imagination from the pragmatics and preoccupations of day-to-day reality. The work’s final visual language stems from post-digital aesthetics of failure, where the detritus of digital technologies become raw material for a subcultural do-it-yourself approach typified by the maker and post-digital hacker movements.
