title: TWIFSY (The world is fine, save yourself), a thesis for a hyper-latent post-digital image object
Creators: name: Thiedeke, Peter G
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: post-digital art
subject: surveillance capitalism
subject: hyper-latent image

description: We live in an age of technologically determined revolution characterised by surveillance capitalism - the automated capture, manipulation, and redistribution of human thought, expression, mobility, and the imagery we create as behavioural surplus data. Big Tech companies' monopolistic advertising business models systematically abuse fundamental human rights as they aggregate and analyse human behaviours to influence and modify them for profit. Through the lens of creative practice, this thesis questions this unprecedented power and control over the World Wide Web and the world's information. The practice-based research is nested within a conceptual framework informed by the philosophical perspectives of Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Vilém Flusser and Paul Virilio. These perspectives frame a metanarrative for the essence of surveillance capitalists' means to an end transformation of society. The research draws on theoretical concepts regarding the ontological aspects of the photographic image transformed by digital technologies to open an alternative approach to the creative practice. The creative works discussed in this thesis are situated within expanded practice aligned to the theoretical position that the digital augmentation of photography has been irreversibly displaced at its convergence with other mediums in offline and online software and databases. The causal relations of the creative works and how the technical tools and artefacts were experienced as causal instruments are examined to reveal the previously overlooked critical aspects of the practice. Through iterative experimentation with the digital image and a phenomenology that explores the tacit, cognitive, and metaphysical factors embodied in its ontological structures, I conceptualise the notion of the hyper-latent image - the multiplicity of fragmented data oscillating between the visible screen surface and the invisible excessive and often unknowable operations beneath it that elude detection as they manipulate perceptions of reality and truth. Four action research cycles were conducted using interdisciplinary art and design methods. Reflection over extended periods frames a technologically determined market-driven digital practice characterised by complicity with the standardised technologies and massified digital platforms that dominate the confluence of the physical and virtual worlds. Reflexively questioning and evaluating the outcomes and the practice relative to the research concerns led to its transformation into a critical post-digital art practice. The experimental works were exhibited and published in distinctive art and design contexts. The final iterations of each practice cycle focus on public art exhibitions in festival contexts to expose the work to a broad audience in physical public places of local cultural significance. These projects involved civic hacking and placemaking using media architecture methods for acupunctural interventions in the urban environment to provide an audience with an embodied visceral experience of the artworks' aura - otherwise shattered by their exponential reproduction across digital platforms. This work rejects Big Tech's private enterprise dominance of global virtual space and the reduction of behavioural surplus data into a capital commodity. However, in each instance, the artworks were either reduced to agents of the market-driven art-as-entertainment digital experience economy or online social media commodities complicit with surveillance capitalism. This thesis culminates with TWIFSY (The world is fine, save yourself). This paradoxical, ambiguous post-digital image object represents the absolute grounding of the hyper-latent image in defiance of surveillance capitalism. TWIFSY operates as a thought experiment - a speculative design fiction borrowing from world fairs, art, design, and science fiction film and literature traditions. The work aims to elucidate the fragmentation of society subjected to data aggregation and digitised mass surveillance to provoke thought about the plausibility of what may eventuate in the near-future public sphere. TWIFSY implies a dimensionless non-place of the future where consciousness is captured in centralised systems of power and control over citizens. Through its relational aesthetics, TWIFSY's final cause, as a hybrid form of participatory artmaking, seeks to stimulate conversations about surveillance capitalism and challenge society's complicity. It hopes to transform through bottom-up social dreaming and collective resistance to technological determinism.