BERLIN.- Reality today emerges less as a stable foundation than as a shifting mix of infrastructures, codes, sensations, and temporalities that constantly reconfigure how the world is seen and understood. What we encounter as the real is produced through the constant process of multiple systems, technological, symbolic, and perceptual, that intersect and interfere with one another.
Technical networks, data flows, media platforms, and algorithmic grids coexist alongside biological streams, social relations, and felt experiences, all together forming a dense and complicated field of overlapping layers. Although functioning somewhat independently, they require these complex networks to create a reality that is inherently unstable and alwaysst, present, and future.
Within these conditions, reality becomes something that is mediated not only through what we see, hear, and feel, but also through the systems within which these experiences occur. The contemporary perception of reality becomes something that is negotiated through representation, computatio in motion. As a result, reality is not a singular moment, but rather a complex coexistence of panal and real experiences, and thus, reality is also something highly individual. To live within these systems of reality is to navigate a constantly shifting terrain, where meaning, control, and understanding are continually shaped by movement, overlap, and mediating systems.
Digital technologies do not simply reflect this unstable reality; they actively participate in its production. Algorithmic systems organise and filter information, determining what becomes visible and accessible, while interfaces translate complex computational processes into more familiar forms that are easy to navigate. Hence, reality increasingly appears as a negotiated flow of updates, repetitions, and feedback loops, where meaning is produced through adjustment and circulation rather than through linear narratives.
In drifts; , reality is explored as an entangled mesh of layers that shapes our sense of time, our relations, and our perception. Infrastructures, codes, surfaces, and more-than-human entanglements, together with the extended spaces of digital culture, produce a reality that is in constant flux.
'21.000 II' by artist Yoshi Sodeoka brings the layered processes of digital production into the physical space, combining a decade of photos of the sun with mathematical structures and hand-drawn marks. Projected imagery, sketches, and calculations coexist across multiple surfaces, creating a field where precision and improvisation overlap. Sodeoka’s installation shows normally hidden digital layers, allowing for natural cycles, technical systems, and personal gestures to share a single, open space.
In 'A Field Guide to Orbital Melancholy', artist Cezar Mocan explores what happens when systems designed to see everything still fail to understand what they observe. Taking the perspective of a distributed satellite trying to account for the disappearance of a toxic lake, the work exposes how automated vision produces overlapping and often conflicting versions of reality.
In her smaller works, Yehwan Song addresses how the user is shaped by the internet through constant data production, endless scrolling, and forms of unpaid digital labor. In her moving sculptures, 'Please Don’t', 'Witnessing' and 'All I need is' , designed to self-generate and automate human interaction online, she critiques systems in which human energy is absorbed by automated digital processes rather than benefiting the user.
Together, these practices operate as both poetic and critical ways of engaging with a reality that is continuously produced rather than simply presented. Through layering, overlap, and transformation, the works reflect a shared attention to processes that remain in flux.
Text by Stina Gustafsson
