reality, by algorithm.

2026

An audiovisual installation about the structural effects of algorithmic systems.

https://showcase.tha.de/ia-ims/reality-by-algorithm

Supervision:

Prof. Andreas Muxel

Prof. Daniel Rothaug

Algorithmic recommendation systems shape which content becomes visible in digital environments and how attention, discourses and cultural expressions are organized. Their workings often remain opaque to users, even though they noticeably structure perception and communicative practices.

The audiovisual installation examines these structural effects and translates them into a spatial experience. It deliberately avoids didacticism: algorithmic logics are not explained but staged as a sensory, spatially atmospheric and temporally sequenced experience.

The work unfolds across five dramaturgically coordinated acts, organizing perception as a temporally sequenced experience: from the mechanisms of algorithmic selection through the normalization of cultural patterns and algorithms as infrastructural power structures to digital language ecologies and the question of orientation and agency.

Text serves as the central design material of the work. Digital publics are organized to a large extent through text, and algorithmic systems operate primarily by processing, weighting and structuring textual content. Text thus becomes the interface between cultural expression and technical logic. As a carrier of meaning and at the same time a shapeable typographic material, it is condensed, shifted and fragmented. In this way, algorithmic dynamics are formally staged in their structural logic.

A multi-layered scaffold forms the spatial structure of the installation. Projections onto semi-transparent surfaces generate overlaps and displacements that translate algorithmic processes of filtering and transformation into a visual structure.

Audio frames the visual states affectively and physically. The music, scored by Lorenz Schauler, intensifies the emotional qualities of the individual acts and makes their temporal development perceptible. Different sonic atmospheres evoke intuitive states of order, density, irritation or overwhelm and thus reinforce the dramaturgical structure of the installation.