According to economists such as Yanis Varoufakis, we have entered the age of technofeudalism. Our technologically advanced present has given rise to a new order, in which the capitalist model of profit-making has been overtaken by the arbitrary monopolies of digital platforms. As Varoufakis observes, markets and profits that were once central to capitalism are now being increasingly replaced by the data- and money-based fees of cloud platforms. With the development of the internet and digital technologies, it seemed we had been granted “free” access to a multitude of platforms. Yet our activity in these realms—unpaid and uncredited—generates profit for their owners. Once these platforms secure their irreplaceable position in our lives, they introduce or raise the cost of access—often to spaces we ourselves have filled with content by uncompensated labour. These power relations echo the logic of feudalism, in which landless peasants were entirely dependent on the estates of the lords, bound to live and work there while providing obligatory services in return.
The exhibition probes the duality between the reality of our democratic states and the so-called cloud-based, virtual, global technofeudalist reality. In theory, we might choose to withdraw from this network—portrayed as immaterial yet built from heavy metals and sustained by server farms whose manufacture and operation entail considerable carbon emissions—but doing so increasingly brings isolation and disadvantage. The network binds us to others and to vast constellations of information, yet it functions according to a logic alien to the physical world—reshaping our behaviour, our value systems, and our human relationships. The exhibition addresses the complex phenomenon of technofeudalism and our own equally intricate, often ambivalent relationship to it as participants. The symbol of the net in central, as is simultaneously invokes the ancient practice of fishing and the web-like architecture of the internet, and alludes to the double-edged nature of digital platforms: are we users of the net, or is it us that the net is used on?
If every fragment of information online serves first and foremost as bait for our attention, how can we place our trust in words? The attention economy manufactures belief, and in the chaos of its competing narratives, James Bridle warns, we may find ourselves entering a new dark age. Through a contemporary reimagining of the 19th-century lithophane technique, Martha Kicsiny explores, via the medium of light, what hopes we can still nurture, and what truths we can still believe in, in the age of technofeudalism.
https://www.marthakicsiny.hu/
https://www.instagram.com/marthakicsiny/
https://www.horizontgallery.com/artist/kicsiny-martha
