11 · 2025
Approved
Triptych · 3D render · video
Approval culture as the engine of digital feudalism: to be visible, we voluntarily apply someone else's mark to ourselves.
- Methods
- Body scan · 3D render · Video, 14 sec
Approval culture as the engine of digital feudalism. Corporations own the digital land, and users become vassals who pay with data and attention for the right to be visible.
To be approved is to exist. So we brand ourselves voluntarily: a plaster, a sticker, a filter, a trend. New versions of the passport and the badge.
I chose the plaster as one of the dumbest forms of self-stigmatisation: applied from outside, disposable, with someone else's word printed on it. The shell under it is coal black, the colour of fuel. Coal and oil are compressed ancient life, the energy of the ground in a burnable form, and this system can only count a person as fuel.
This is where the coal shell came from. It carries into everything after it.
Three parts
The mark, the post, the shell
- The mark. The plaster sticks to noses and approves the gesture. I stood out from the grey mass, except I only dove into another one.
- The post. The same mark, published.
- The shell cracks. It peels off with the sound everyone knows. Tearing it off hurts, and the shell cracks along with it, letting through the gold that was never burned.
Where is your stigma?
A question after the work
The work closes with a checklist the viewer answers alone, across the personal, the social, the creative and the professional. Not a wall text to read, but a question to sit with after leaving the room.
Exhibition format
One wall
Two prints and one vertical screen on a single wall. Screen 65-85 inch in portrait orientation, prints scaled to match its height.