Apophenic Revelation: Accumulation, Collage, and Conflationary Strategies in Internet Artworks/

Abstract

Given that the experiences contemporary social media feeds create are so individualized, and that private companies are allowed to deny users meaningful information about how their content-serving algorithms work, it stands to reason that we require speculation, and to an extreme degree, apophenia and spiritual belief, to understand the meaning of our interactions with content serving algorithms. This is exemplified in various artworks made for and about the internet, which often utilize accumulation, collage, and conflationary strategy to embody the spiritual significance of new, novel curatorial technologies that are nearly impossible to understand. Research on this topic concludes with a description/images of my senior showcase work "Call to Action", an interactive sculpture that automatically prints receipts with transcriptions from TikTok ads in which no product or service is being sold.