TWIFSY (The world is fine, save yourself) – an ambiguous post-digital image object for ISEA 2024

TWIFSY (The world is fine, save yourself) is a 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.

TWIFSY evolved as a thought experiment that 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 dayto-day reality. 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.

Video documentation - the panels, the details inside the panels at proximity, and decoding the image-object using a mobile-phone

0:00–1:35 External perspectives of the ambiguous image-object’s panels.

1:35-3:30 The simulations inside the image object recorded at proximity with a macro lens and a robotic motion control camera system.

3:30-5:20 The image object is decoded through variable viewer positions, distances, and using a camera device to reduce the pseudo-pixels to a perceptible resolution.

For best visual clarity, this video can be viewed at 2K or 4K resolution by changing settings using the cog icon. For best audio clarity, the use of headphones is recommended.

Sound design

The sound is as much a design fiction as the visual world-building references to Futurama (1939).

Ambient sound for 161 Collins Street

There is a looping background track that will be embedded into the installations. It is an hour long with ambient ‘seasonal’ changes that range from calm to chaotic and there is a lot of cinematic sound reference. The thinking is reflective of the filmic media conditioning and aural semiosis of the sounds that program us through cliché narratives ie. Hollywood, pop-culture, sci-fi, the patriarchal hero’s journey, and the mechanised digitality of sci-fi sound.etc.

Above: This draft is the ambient sound that will be embedded into the 161 Collins St Installation.

Online narrative based ‘episodes’.

In developing the sounds as an aural device to locate the audience in a space of imaginary future narratives, I have also made a series of three 8-9 minute episodes or micro-stories that mimic the 1930s-40s radio shows–think ‘The adventure of Biggles’ radio shows. These stories were developed as an aural device to locate the audience into dystopic past/present/future narratives of technological determinism, particularly those from history that have been used as political and war propaganda, where nationalistic narratives of victories, disasters, heroes, and other grand geo-political narratives have been used to influence and modify peoples behaviours and society, much like Futurama was.

The episodes can be made available online, so any interested folks can download and listen to them remotely or on-site through smart phones as mp3 using QR codes or other app tech. That way they are not looping on-site, which would prove to be annoying to tenants. This approach also allows people to listen in an un-programmed way, in their own time and space. The intention is subliminality and to augment 161 Collins St, not disturb it.

Above: Two of the three episodes that can be accessed online by interested viewers, either remotely, or at the installation site as they experience the physicality of the ambiguous image-object and the story simultaneously.

Visual detail of the box panels from variable distances

As one moves toward TWIFSY, the illusory image object surface collapses into a pseudo-architectural space an abstracted hyperreality that reveals hundreds of tiny model pseudo-citizens–made from medical resin 3D printed from computer-generated models–each with different postures, gestures, clothing, and accessories appearing in numerous scenarios and situations.

Above: This image illustrates the detail in Panel #15 at a proximity of eighty centimetres. As the viewer moves toward the image object, the illusory image disappears, and a simulated architectural space emerges to reveal hundreds of tiny model ‘citizens’, which, encapsulated in transparent enclosures, are arranged in numerous fictitious scenarios and situations.

Close-up imagery of some of the many details and ‘scenarios’ simulated within TWIFSY

On close physical inspection, TWIFSY’s intricate details relate to and mimic the networked effects of Big Tech’s panoptic schema of concealed servers. The arrangement of these figures and the tens of thousands of peripheral objects embedded within TWIFSY reveal many narratives that imply social, anti-social, voyeuristic, and narcissistic behaviours in fictitious private and public spaces, where imagery and data streams form a constant flow of advertising, entertainment, and user-generated commentary.

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Pseudo-satellite imagery

TWIFSY’s development in relief was monitored with numerous cameras, including an overhead view, progressively revealing pseudo-satellite imagery from three metres (see below) which implies miniature built and virtual environments that can be explored at ground level as pseudo-street-views.

From this process, a new aesthetic emerged, which evokes the post-digital ‘asterism’ of digital material culture resembling ‘aerial photography of landscapes and cities’ providing a ‘distant reading of society and everyday life’ as an organised collective of 'functionally linked individuals’ that provides a ‘sense of cohesion in a fragmentary digital experience’ (Berry 2015, 51).

Above: This image shows sixteen of the twenty-four finished panels illuminated with white light. Captured from a three-meter birds-eye view, they cover an area of 240cm x 208cm.

**Associated process imagery 2019-2023–TWIFSY under construction**

This image shows the media facade under construction with the originnal JPG image virtually overlayed onto an image of its north-facing wall. This composite image and the grid structures represented were used to pre-visualise the scale and dimensions of the image object.

This image shows one of the 1,176 acrylic micro-grid structures used to support the 7 x 8-pixel arrays that form the image-based layer of TWIFSY. The pseudo-pixel colours are encoded in relation to the electronic pixels of the over-enlarged JPG image. The 72mm x 82mm micro-grid was placed against the computer screen to map the virtual pixel colours extracted from the over-enlarged jpeg image to the colours of acrylic pseudo-pixels, each measuring 8mm x 8mm

This image shows the vector graphic design used to laser-cut the scaffolding structures supporting the image base layer for TWIFSY’s twenty-four panels and 65,856 pseudo pixels. The 520mm x 590mm form contains forty-nine rectangular bays that each support a 72mm x 82mm microgrid that, in turn, each supports 56 pseudo pixels. The microgrids are colour-encoded to temporally sequence a cutting protocol for the Trotec Speedy 400 laser cutter, which cuts each colour consecutively. Each colour is spatially separated from the next so the heat from the focussed laser beam is not concentrated in any area during the cutting sequence and is evenly distributed throughout the material to prevent warping.

This image shows the pseudo-pixels, which were washed, tested, and categorised according to each material's colour, translucency, and opacity when backlit. The pseudo-pixels were then assigned a code that roughly corresponds to the digital pixels of the remnant digital JPG used to determine their x-y coordinate position in the microgrids.

The base-layer of the panels are assembled onto a light panel that is used to globally illuminate 49 micro-grids. Each panel is independently programmable using DMX addressing.

Detail from Panel #15, backlit with white light. The panel base layer consist of 49 micro-grids and 2,744 acrylic pseudo-pixels. The objects in relief include acrylic platforms, optical acrylic rods, and 3D printed figures made from medical resin. The panel is held rigid and supported using stainless steel threaded rods.

A vector design for a fictitious urban assemblage – perhaps a city plaza where citizens might congregate.

A plaza takes form in both vertical and horizontal orientations simultaneously.

Multiple layers of coloured acrylic are stacked and slightly offset to create a three-dimensional anaglyph effect. The viewer also experiences an illusory sense of depth as they move past the image object due to the parallax effects of the layers’ separation.

Prototyping the human figures involved experimenting with numerous materials. The eerly tests used ABS (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene), PLA (polylactic acid) and nylon. The final work used Biomed amber resin, which is used to make biocompatible prostheses. It was chosen for its optical qualities.

The first prototype for the media facade used recycled Apple I-Macs. The glitching screens were used to develop the aesthetics for a dystopic Smart City of the future and the world-building scenarios that emerged from their surfaces in relief.

Early exploration of the pseudo-architectural space that emerged from the screen surfaces reveals a sprawling and alienating matrix of detritus, emulating what Benjamin Bratton refers to as an ‘accidental megastructure’ of carbon and silicon-based molecules within a city of perplexing grids and ‘data archipelagos’ (Bratton 2015, 5-10).

This image shows the emergent details of Panel #12. The 72 x 82mm orange rectangular shape in the foreground forms one of the multiple layers recycled of backlit coloured acrylic. The 10mm figures arranged on the surface layer are early prototypes that were additively manufactured using a MakerBot 3D printer and recycled composite nylon.

Urban sprawl.

An experiment in arranging the panels vertically to emulate the construction of a skyscraper.

This image shows the emergence of a post-digital pseudo-media facade, which emerged parallel to the development of the work on the studio floor. It is made from timber, acrylic, and stainless steel and a composition of acrylic offcuts left over from the fabrication of the pseudo-pixels and microgrid components.

This image shows the gradual transformation of the pseudo-media facade with additional layers of e-wasted iMac screen components that were superimposed over the wasted pseudo-pixel off-cuts as the iMacs were gradually cannibalised.

The final panels being hung on the wall frame in a 6x4 array – 4.09m h x 2.09m w x 23cm d.

References

Andrews, Ian. 2013. "Post-digital aesthetics and the function of process." In Cleland, K., Fisher, L. & Harley, R. (Eds.) Proceedings of the 19th International Symposium of Electronic Art, ISEA2013, Sydney.

Archey, Karen, and Robin Peckham. 2014. "Art Post-Internet." Ullens Center for Contemporary Art.

Berry, David M. 2015. "The Postdigital Constellation." In Postdigital aesthetics: art, computation and design, edited by David M. Berry and Michael Dieter, 44-57. Vol. Book, Whole. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire;New York, NY;: Palgrave Macmillan.

Cascone, Kim. 2000. "The Aesthetics of Failure: "Post-Digital" Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music." Computer Music Journal 24 (4): 12-18.

Krapp, Peter. 2011. Noise channels : glitch and error in digital culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.