The Subsumption Machine is a skeletal multi-level media tower hacked with video projections, TV monitors, billboards, stage sets, building models, live video feeds, and surveillance cameras. As the audience walks through the chaotic architectural structure the onstage and backstage merge. Participants are captured on camera and unwittingly inserted into the media stream. In a Warholian gesture, The Subsumption Machine flattens all hierarchy of representation to a common supersaturated image field, depicting the postmodern dystopian world as a biopolitical “prison house of language”.
In the age of interactive media and industries that manufacture desire, we find ourselves in increasingly manipulated social and political situations. Our condition is no longer defined by a lack of access to tools in an era of media monopolization. We no longer struggle for the opportunity or ability to represent our own stories and produce our own media. Instead, we find ourselves in an overly theatricalized world where participation is marketed as a cultural imperative. Turn on and tune in, but drop out is no longer an available option. Built for the purpose of manufacturing desire, this pavilion is propelled by converting human will for “other options” into its fuel. The lives of willing and unwilling participants provide content and give form to The Subsumption Machine.
The Façade Series
