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INTERFACE 000000: _*CLICK HERE*_THE FUCK IS THIS?
This artistic research project investigates how contemporary consciousness - shaped by digital systems, networked media, and the disintegrating conditions of late capitalism - can be processed, represented, or resisted through artistic form. It has been a way to contain a tangential multi-media artistic research practice in a familiar environment which allows for the unravelling and linking of reference points in a rhizomatic sitemap, but is increasingly at risk.
The structure of the work draws from video games, role-playing systems, and tangential internet experiences such as online Wiki pages. Particularly the use of internal fragmented dialogue, characterisation, categorisation, tangentiality, and perceived choice or navigation as cognitive devices. These devices act as competing lenses through which information is processed. This approach is informed by works such as "Disco Elysium" and "Slay the Princess", which prioritise interiority, contradiction, and interpretation over linear progression or resolution.
[ZA/UM] Studio [a reference to the Russian Futurist writing and poetry movement Zaum], the creators of Disco Elysium, created this piece of art and writing in the vehicle of a game to offer invested viewer [user, player] interaction. Its lead writer, Robert Kurwitz, believes very strongly in the important of speculative and fictional world builders.. Its lead artist and director, Alexander Rostov, originally trained as an oil painter, has described the game as “very clearly a game about art.” Many of the game’s environments were initially painted as physical oil works before being translated into digital space, drawing on traditions of expressive realism and psychological distortion. Portraiture in the game functions symbolically rather than neutrally, reflecting the protagonist Harry Du Bois’s fractured psyche and his subjective interpretation of the people he encounters.
This painterly logic is embedded mechanically within the game itself. One of the protagonist’s internal faculties - Conceptualisation - allows the player to internalise abstract ideas through the “Thought Cabinet”: a surreal, Bosch-like painted space in which ideas are visualised, embodied, and absorbed over time. These ideas alter the character’s abilities while consuming in-game time, collapsing cognition, image, and system into a single interface. Art theory becomes something enacted, inhabited, and metabolised rather than passively referenced.
Some pages in this project contain artworks produced directly in response to the concerns articulated in the writing. These works now merge with the research itself, appearing as page backgrounds, triggered interactions, time-based prompts, or referential artefacts encountered through navigation. Artworks do not function here as illustrations of theory, but as agents within the structure of the experience; subject to the same conditions of circulation, interruption, and decay as the text.
At its core, the project is formulated as a dilemma with painting—the primary source of much of the work developed and displayed—and with frustration around how painting might meaningfully reflect the tangled fabric of contemporary experience. Painting increasingly appears less as a stable object and more as a process caught mid-circulation. Works are scanned, dismantled, erased, overpainted, digitised, compressed, databent, rebuilt, and redistributed. At each stage, they accrue loss and gain: histories are stripped away, new contexts attach themselves, artefacts emerge, and traces of use become embedded in the image.
This condition closely aligns with Hito Steyerl’s concept of the poor image: an image defined not by resolution or purity, but by speed, circulation, compression, and mutation. In this work, images and paintings behave as poor images regardless of their material origin. Loss is not treated as degradation alone, but as evidence of movement, contact, and labour. Meaning is not preserved through stability, but produced through repetition, damage, and transformation.
Rather than resisting this process, the work leans into it. Digital systems—often perceived as cold, logical, and neutral—are deliberately interrupted. Metadata is hex-edited and infiltrated with writing, stream-of-consciousness fragments, and affective noise, undermining the illusion of technological objectivity. Systems designed for optimisation, categorisation, and control are repurposed as expressive tools, capable of carrying humour, anxiety, contradiction, and resistance alongside data. Painting becomes less a finished artefact and more a synthesis loop: physical gesture, digital interface, compression, re-materialisation—each stage retaining traces of creative labour and research work.
The second-person pronoun “you” is used for the majority of the experience that follows. This aligns with the logic of digital avatars and online surrogates: perceived stand-ins for identity that provide distance, mediation, or partial anonymity. There is a particular isolation in being connected to vast networks of people while engaging with them almost exclusively alone—at a desk, in a room, through a screen. Even when others are physically present, attention is increasingly negotiated through interfaces and feeds.
The avoidance of the pronoun “I” is deliberate. It allows the work to adopt multiple characters or curated representations of the self, reflecting lived experience as a digital native involved in numerous online communities that permit or necessitate specific personas, biases, and performances. These internal characters are given agency to interrupt dense theory with humour, absurdism, analogy, contradiction, and satire. Often, it is not only the text itself that shapes meaning, but the comment section surrounding it.
The internet, by virtue of its scale, hosts vast quantities of accidental poetry, sincerity, and derangement. Once imagined as a decentralised archive of global culture, it now increasingly operates through algorithmic amplification, performative antagonism, and the simulation of disagreement. Bots mimic human behaviour; humans mimic bots. Claims circulate freely, supported by unstable sources, a condition that accelerates alongside expanding access to generative AI systems.
This project exists within the tension between two increasingly inseparable states: the chronically online, near-transhuman digital experience and the embodied, physical experience of being “IRL.” This mirrors concerns with painting, representation, and identity. Role-play and rehearsal—central to games—also operate socially and digitally, shaping how individuals perform themselves across platforms. Writing to the reader as “you” encourages a game-like, role-playing engagement with these ideas, at times operating like a blog, a wiki, or a fragmented archive, connected through internal and external hyperlinks.
Linearity is optional. Choice is often illusory. You may be led, misdirected, enticed, or temporarily barred from accessing certain pages. You may open every interface in separate tabs, navigate by elimination, or move erratically through tangential links. Some links lead outward—to bibliographic material intended for deeper reading, skimming, or abandonment. Others exist only as anecdotes, jokes, memes, or moments of interest. Not all are core academic references, but their sources remain visible and traceable when encountered.
INTERFACE 001:
THE FUCK? WAIT--YOU HAVEN'T FINI--