TWIFSY: Experimenta, a public art intervention for the Now or Never festival

TWIFSY: Experimenta was a site-specific media art installation curated by Experimenta for the City of Melbourne's Now or Never Festival of Art, Ideas, and Sound situated at the iconic T&G Building–home to Google's offices–from August 22–October 18, 2024. The project was concerned with the ethical and social issues surrounding human digital rights and the onset of the Fourth Industrial Revolution––the fusion of the physical and biological worlds with quantum computing, artificial intelligence, robotics, and the internet of everything, which may enable algorithms to monitor, understand and manipulate humans so that centralised corporations and governments can make decisions on citizen's behalf.

Using speculative design methods and relational aesthetics, the specificity of the site and the surrounding areas informed the installation's design. The T&G's architecture leverages Melbourne's CBD laneway thoroughfares, and the installation was built on the traditions of artist interventions, most notably those in Hosier Lane–Melbourne's most celebrated in the context of street art–which connects the T&G to Federation Square. The installation included two satirical AI stories made with generative AI imagery, text, text-to-speech, music, and sound effects, a multi-channel subliminal mimetic soundscape distributed through the T&G, and a physical post-digital altarpiece at the foot of Google's offices, where citizens participated in Lunchbox talks to build the project's social context. The current technocracy of political power, how it is linked to geographic space and how government decision-makers and business leaders are selected based on their expertise–particularly their scientific or technical knowledge–rather than philosophical position was challenged.