Mother ringtone.
Time’s a great healer

We live in an age of emotions of uncertainty and confusion. The concept of End of history has failed. It is not the end of our history; we are in a place of huge dramatic changes. What’s the answer to ending or changing that?

Bill Hamilton, one of the foremost evolutionary theorists of the 20th century, claimed that human behavior is guided by codes buried deep within us—a theory later popularized by Richard Dawkins as the so-called “selfish gene.” Fundamentally, these people claimed that individual human beings are really just machines whose only job is to make sure their genetic codes are passed on for eternity. Our urge to continue ourselves has passed a long way from religious doctrines to tech manifestos of past and present centuries.

Now we develop machine worlds faster and better than we develop our vision of the future. However, these automatons have started to progressively merge with our capitalist and unstable reality and create an age of uncertainty and confusion. The goal of this manipulation, Adam Curtis, the filmmaker, suggests, is to spread a state of bewilderment and powerlessness across the globe—a sense that nothing quite makes sense. Technology, in particular social media, becomes the ally of those forces. The global technology companies not only feed a mirror of our obsessions back to us but also increasingly try to normalize our behavior by collecting data about our health and our habits and selling us a fixed idea of who we should be and what we should like (“if you liked that, you will like this”).

These processes are perceived by us through machines and algorithms—social media, gadgets, and tools. Automatons we initially made for the connection of humanity and changing the world for the better are now changing us. Will this future shape this chemical and auto-regulated inversion? The irony of this feedback is that it fuels prejudice and is fueled by anger. The angrier users are, the more extreme their emotional states, the more they click, and the more money rolls into Twitter, Facebook, and the rest. These Objects of Desire now have their own agency, their own source of power. They constantly evolve and mutate. Their ideas, dogmas, and forms mutate with them.

Through the artwork, I want to highlight these mutations and this new relation of powers. If we have no control over our actions, is it an excuse and rationalization of our failure? Will automatons create an alternative life for us or for themselves? Or can we create our own?