TWIFSY (The world is fine, save yourself) is a series of playful acupunctural urban art interventions applying circular economics. In each instance, TWIFSY manifests as a remixed ambiguous image object in public spaces. As a media art installation, it functions like a prototype, prop, puzzle, and model to provoke thought about the near-future world and stimulate thought about how urban life may manifest in the future Smart City mediated by ubiquitous computer networks and artificial intelligence algorithms. This Smart City infrastructure shapes urban life by interlacing and overlaying objects and people with digital networks embedded into everything to sense and communicate real-time data flows that can transform citizens' lives.
Formally, TWIFSY consists of 121,000 hand-assembled components–a mass of recycled e-wasted computers, laser cut acrylic, 3D printed resin figures, steel, glass, LEDs, amplifiers, speakers, ethernet, DMX512-A and Art-net software protocols. TWIFSY's mimetic visual language stems from aesthetics of failure typified by the maker and post-digital hacker movements, where digital detritus becomes raw material for a bricolage of surplus digital and non-digital materials and media, including corrupt image data errors, glitches, and malfunctioning data servers. These materials are iteratively appropriated, repurposed, and remixed into variable arrays of illuminated box panels configured as luminous monoliths. As analogue derivatives of the virtual world-building paradigm, exemplified by Minecraft, TWIFSY aims to provide meaning to the abstract materiality of the digital by drawing attention to the structures that make it possible.
Conceptually, TWIFSY speaks to the speculative cultures of science-fiction, futurism, literature, politics, and film to free the imagination from the pragmatics and preoccupations of day-to-day reality. The work imagines life where the real and virtual worlds have merged into a singularity, a megastructure of planetary-scale computation that manifests as a machine world comprising layers of hardware, software, chemical, biological, and electrical systems where humans co-exist with non-humans. TWIFSY gestures to the history of speculative concept models, exemplified by General Motors Corporation's (GMC) Highways & Horizons exhibit and at the 1939 New York World's Fair. The GMC dioramic installation, also known as Futurama speculated on futural solutions to economic, social, and political problems during the post-depression period, a vision that promised to overcome unemployment and social divisions. However, the ideologies of mass production and overconsumption, which have been adopted and installed by global oligarchies and state institutions worldwide, are now concreted into everyday life–typified by urban blight, suburban sprawl, traffic congestion, and the centralised hermetically sealed shopping malls that host the global brands that have attempted to kill off the Commons.
TWIFSY was selected for ISEA 2024–The 29th International Symposium of Electronic Art–where the associated paper Speculating Smart: An Ambiguous Image Object was presented by the discussion panel Experimental Arts in Public Space. The Brisbane City Council funded the work's installation in the Brisbane CBD, in Queen Street Mall from 20 June to 14 July 2024.
TWIFSY also appeared in The City of Melbourne's Now or Never festival from the 22nd of August to the 19th of October 2024 at the historic T&G Building at 161 Collins Street, where citzens were invited to participate in the Lunchbox Talks with Experimenta.
