Performance of an Algorithmic Consciousness (2024)

Six illuminated lightboxes, digital print, self-portrait photographs, and AI-generated images, 100 × 6 cm.

T-shirts with quotes from the books of Byung-Chul Han.

In a world where reality is filtered, bodies are shaped by algorithms, and identity becomes ever more editable, this installation examines the digital self as a performative process.

The illuminated signs, made from metal and plexiglass, present fake Instagram profiles populated with people who never existed – faces generated by artificial intelligence. These curated profiles are tagged with REALITY / FANTASY / IN-BETWEEN, confronting the viewer with the fragile and shifting terrain of digital subjectivity. They occupy a liminal visual space – not quite true, not entirely false – and yet entirely familiar in a culture saturated with hyperreal presence.

Also featured are T-shirts printed with quotes from Byung-Chul Han, each paired with a wig – physical extensions of the abstract, posthuman “face” of a new subjectivity. These quotes are not slogans, but fragments of philosophical meditation, guiding the viewer through layers of projection, exposure, and mediated self-performance.

 The installation resonates with the conceptual space of metamodernism – characterized by its oscillation between irony and sincerity, simulation and desire for meaning. Here, the body becomes both real and artificial, identity is stretched between consumption and contemplation, and the self is reconfigured as an algorithmic entity continuously performing for the digital swarm.

 Rather than offering answers, the work proposes a kind of luminous reflection – projected on screens, printed on fabric, embedded in light – leaving us to ask:

 Who are we in the flow?

And when does the flow begin to think for us?