Peter Thiedeke
TWIFSY (The world is fine, save yourself), 2024

Peter Thiedeke’s TWIFSY (The world is fine, save yourself), is an ambiguous post-digital artwork born from research into our societal transition towards technological determinism and monopolistic ownership of Big Data – our shift from human to a post-human condition.

Made of modular, mixed-media panels, TWIFSY beckons like a glowing lighthouse. The shifting colour spectrum surface creates the illusion of a moving image that can be decoded through a smartphone camera. As the audience moves closer, a GIF-like face – a representation of an imagined ‘ancestral being’, emerges at a scale beyond easy recognition. It flickers, glitches, and gradually dissolves, giving way to the hidden world beneath. A world populated by hundreds of tiny human-like figures enacting utopic fictions, somewhat reminiscence of the ‘render ghosts’ in modernist architectural renderings and models.

TWIFSY prompts us to reflect on a potential future where the real and the virtual have coalesced. In a time when the custodians of our digital networks and the arbiters of our information will shape our socio-cultural interactions and our understanding of reality.

Experience TWIFSY at the T&G Building as part of Now or Never.
22 August – 18 October 2024

Venue
T&G Building –  Atrium, 161 Collins 161 Collins Street, Melbourne.
Hours
Monday to Friday, 8.30am – 6pm

TWIFSY Stories: A Thought Project⟶

In this accompanying project, artist Peter Thiedeke uses speculative design methods to create stories that build upon the potential future world explored in TWIFSY (The world is fine, save yourself).

Speculative design methods, which Dunne and Raby (2013) position with other speculative cultures such as futurology, literature, politics, and fine art – go ‘well beyond logical worlds and more pragmatic world building’ to create a space for discussion and ‘dialectical opposition between fiction and reality’.

TWIFSY Stories take the form of a series of videos, with imagery and soundscapes generated by AIs prompted to speculate how urban environments will manifest in a technologically determined world, after the collapse of the biosphere and beyond.

Explore the TWISFY stories