Templates of Engagement
Archive-101
is an automated browser-based bot, that drives along Highway 101 and archives the uncanny billboard advertisements specifically targeting software developers. Emerging from a field trip during the 2025 AI boom, it explores how the world-making abilities of developers revolve around a recursive process of software development and use. As the visitor navigates a digital replicate of the daily route, they get exposed to the visual environment of those who design the interpretive conditions for computation and the ideological assumptions being marketed to them.
Movement 504
is a performative installation which reassembles a three-dimensional version of a digital user interface. Produced at a 78:1 scale, as a replica of Apple’s original “slide to unlock” interface, made of inflatable PVC and designed as a literal slide. Users are prompted to perform the patented “Movement 504” gesture by executing it with their entire body. The work reflects on the performative conditioning of interfaces and users, highlighting how repetitive interactions make technology feel natural and how engagement in human-computer interaction is a delusional state that inherently hides the computational system itself.
I Apologize for the Confusion
is an experimental setting that puts a large language model into a self-generating loop: it receives an empty prompt, generates a response, and then feeds its own output back as the next input. After n steps, Natural Language Processing algorithms analyze the generated text for quantified features—constituting cybernetic statistics of statistics. The work reveals how contemporary language models, acting as lossy compression algorithms, are designed for engagement aesthetics and statistical optimization within contemporary capitalism.
Arranging Data Into Lists
is an exploration of video content with zero views—a statistical visual void in a system predicated on visibility. Here, techniques like domain-specific stopword searches and random prefix sampling are used to uncover the metrified distribution of the so-called attention economy. These videos represent the unobserved, the non-recommended, the unengaged. The emitted light, an ambient-average of unseen pixels, stands in for the attention that never materialized. Through the blending of experimental informatics and digital anthropology, it unfolds a media archaeology of attention—an investigation into how human perception has been rendered computable on the WWW.
