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TWIFSY @ISEA2024

media
posted on 2024-11-17, 23:57 authored by Peter ThiedekePeter Thiedeke

TWIFSY (The world is fine, save yourself) @ISEA was a site-specific 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 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.

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. The project evolved as a thought experiment and 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. TWIFSY @ISEA2024 was installed in The Queen Street Mall, which is approximately 500 metres long, with six major shopping centres and more than 700 retailers over 40,000 square metres of space. This hybrid civic hack offers a slightly subversive acupunctural experience of the city’s retail centre for cathartic relief to the pollutive commodification of the public sphere.

Funding

TWIFSY (The world is fine, save yourself),Brisbane City Council

History

ERA Category

  • Original Creative Work - Visual Art

Funding type

  • Public funds

Eligible major research output?

  • Yes

Research Statement

Background TWIFSY @ISEA2024 is the first in a series of site-specific urban interventions under the TWIFSY (The world is fine, save yourself) acronym. This public art installation was designed to stimulate thought about how urban life may manifest in the future Smart City. As 'civic hacking', a bottom-up approach to city-making (de Waal and de Lange 2019), it is situated within urban media art contexts as 'resistance' to government and corporations' commodification of public space (Ag et al. 2016). Contribution The installation, which applied circular economics, consisted of 121,000 components, including recycled e-wasted computers, acrylic, 3D-printed resin figures, steel, glass, LEDs, ethernet, and DMX512-A and Art-net software protocols. This remnant of a utopian digital revolution, now reduced to the banalities of everyday life, is a contribution to the post-digital hacker movement, where the detritus of digital technologies becomes raw material for a subcultural do-it-yourself approach typified by the aesthetics of failure. As acupunctural civic hacking in the city's retail heart, the work subverts the top-down urban technocracy that contributes to collective overconsumption, leading to catastrophic damage to the natural world. Significance ISEA2024–The 29th International Symposium of Electronic Art–and Curator Jonathan Parsons selected TWIFSY through a competitive peer review of over 400 electronic artworks worldwide. The Brisbane City Council commissioned and funded TWIFSY's installation in the Queen Street Mall, where a footfall of 1,831,545 people was recorded from June 20 to July 14, 2024. The associated research was presented during ISEA2024's Experimental Arts in Public Space panel.

Publisher

ISEA 2024, The 29th International Symposium of Electronic Art

Place of publication

Brisbane

Confidential / Culturally sensitive

  • No

Copyright notes

© 2024 Peter Thiedeke

References

Cramer, Florian. 2015. "What Is ‘Post-digital’?" In Postdigital aesthetics: art, computation and design, edited by David M. Berry and Michael Dieter, 12-25. Vol. Book, Whole. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire;New York, NY;: Palgrave Macmillan. Dunne, Anthony, Fiona Raby, and Inc Books24x. 2013. Speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming. Vol. Book, Whole. London; Cambridge, Massachusetts;: The MIT Press. Toft, Tanya. 2017. "Disobedience – What Urban Media Art Brings to Digital Placemaking.” In Media Architecture Compendium: Digital Placemaking, 95- 97, edited by Hespanhol, Luke, M Hank Haeusler, Martin Tomitsch, and Gernot Tscherteu. 2017. avedition. Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The age of surveillance capitalism : the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. First ed. Vol. Book, Whole. New York, NY: PublicAffairs.

Medium

Recycled e-wasted computers, acrylic, 3D-printed resin figures, steel, glass, LEDs, ethernet, and DMX512-A and Art-net software protocols.

Size of work

9,700cm L x 2,200m H x 600mm W

Authors of work performed

Peter Thiededke

Exhibition date from

2024-06-20

Exhibition date to

2024-07-14

Was the work disseminated?

  • Yes

Form of dissemination

  • Exhibition

Scope of dissemination

  • International

Did the work go on tour?

  • No

Venue

Queen Street Mall

Location of work

Queen St. Brisbane

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