“Speculating Smart: An Ambiguous Image Object” presented by Unknown presenters
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Experimental Arts in Public (pictorials/visual essays)
Presentation Title:
- Speculating Smart: An Ambiguous Image Object
Presentation Subtheme:
- Speculative Practices
Presenter(s):
Venue(s):
Abstract:
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 dystopian 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. It offers citizens a space to free their imagination from the pragmatics and preoccupations of day-to-day reality. The work’s 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.
