digital aesthetics
‘incidental’ explores the realm of digital aesthetics. It reveals not a reflection, but a shifting interpretation of the present. Responding to the ever growing presence of beautification filters and AI-generated aesthetics, the work questions what is lost when reality is constantly manipulated and dictated by limiting beauty standards and idealized aesthetics. Echoing Hito Steyerl ideals of the poor image , having images be ‘thrust into digital uncertainty, at the expense of its own substance’.
This piece questions the foundations of how we perceive and mediate reality through technology, through randomness the machine becomes both author and filter: indifferent to trends and aesthetic norms. Digitalization becomes a process of transformation, distortion, and abstraction, rather than enhancement. The ‘real’ we perceive is not a fixed truth but something mutable. The digital mirror created by the piece is a digital gaze that fights against the ever present eye of mainstream social media, providing a language of resistance and speculation towards different forms of digital representation.
‘incidental’ foregrounds randomness and constant change, disrupting the illusion of control or perfection in digital production. By allowing an algorithm to dictate the aesthetic outcome without aiming for beauty or coherence, the work opens a space for alternatives that embrace unpredictability, imperfection, and the ephemeral.
window of alternatives
‘incidental’ consists of a CRT television (can also be a screen) displaying a live feed from a video camera, its imagery manipulated randomly by a computer in real-time. The piece engages with the audience, since the more they look at it, the more it evolves.
At the same time, sounds from the environment are processed, creating a fragmented and distorted soundscape. Together, image and sound form a feedback loop of the real, digitally mediated and perpetually in flux.
The screen acts as a metaphorical window—not into a curated or idealized version of the world, but into an algorithmically mediated present. The piece has no fixed form; it never repeats, never pauses. It exists as a live system, a machine of perception in flux.
