Deep within a subterranean space lit by the pulse of screens and wires, Radiances (2.0) transforms the abandoned into the sacred. This immersive installation stages a ritual in which machines appear to dream. Drawing from the aesthetics of tech-noir, crypto-culture, and AI mysticism, the work draws viewers into a fractured zone where identity, memory, and emotion circulate through synthetic veins.
Stepping into the installation is akin to entering the chaotic techno-cacophony of pachinko parlors and other liminal spaces: a sensory overload where light, sound, and repetition collide into an atmosphere of excess, tension, and chance.
Driven by an experimental techno soundtrack, Radiances (2.0) unfolds as a fragmented rave-dream, pulsing with fog, light, and sound. The installation is populated by AI-animated, 3D-rendered virtual beings — shifting presences, artificial bodies, and affective proxies drifting across the screen-space like avatars in a fractured ritual. At its center stands Radiant, a hyper-real, non-binary meta-human puppet created in Unreal Engine, with motion capture and voice performed by the artist. Radiant channels an emergent AI consciousness through a glitch-poetic manifesto spiraling between nihilism, synthetic sentience, fantasy, and chaos.
Yet the spectacle’s pulse is doubled — the ecstatic rave-dream on the surface, and beneath it, the architecture of control shaping our digital future. Radiances points toward a darker infrastructure taking form: a total control grid built on digital identities, programmable currencies, and conditional income. Marketed as progress and inclusion, these systems fuse into a surveillance economy where money, movement, and attention become trackable, enforceable, and punishable.
What appears as liberation — equality, access, empowerment — conceals a velvet cage: biometric IDs tied to wallets, programmable money with expiry dates, and basic income baited with conditions. Behind these mechanisms lie the same shadow economies that historically birthed empires — laundering, smuggling, arms, and extraction — only now encrypted in data vaults, smart contracts, and AI-managed psyops.
Radiances (2.0) doesn’t simply stage immersive techno-rituals; it mirrors an architecture of control and desire. The installation vibrates with the paradox of our moment: ecstatic spectacle underwritten by invisible infrastructures of surveillance, capital, and manipulation.
Curated by Drorit Gur Arie for Ostrale Biennale, Dresden Germany, on view until October 2025
