The many layers of digital infrastructure culminate in the user – the designated beneficiary of these stupendous technologies. But what happens when these users turn out to be machines?
You are here: caught in an endless nightmare of bots that increasingly resemble humans – and humans that increasingly resemble bots. Have we caused our own obsolescence?
Breath. Feel. You are not a machine yet. Remember what makes you human, touch grass, take a walk. And then, if you feel like it, log into the internet again – we will be waiting for you.
WHY THIS PROJECT
What is “digital infrastructure”?
If you are reading these lines, you are already interacting with a piece of it: smartphones and computers are terminals of a vast, planet-wide communication network that includes servers, data centers, submarine cables, power plants and much more. Here, we will analyze digital infrastructure through six “realms”, each representing a specific aspect of planetary digital networks: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface and User.
⚛
THE USER REALM
The “User” realm explores the actors who inhabit and operate within digital infrastructures.
This space is increasingly haunted by automated figures: AI scrapers and crawlers looting online data; recommendation algorithms; click and content farms extracting value from human attention; and finally, the rise of AI agents – a lapidary confirmation of the so-called “dead internet” theory. Meanwhile, humans striving to keep pace have been losing their basic rights: microworkers moderating AIs at minimum wage, sex workers confined to call centers, homeless livestreamers performing in the streets beneath their ring lights. Yet the online environment also remains a place to explore one’s fluid identity, to be part of a collective “hive mind”, and struggle to build a fairer social contract. Here you are invited to explore an atlas of allegorical symbols, each representing a specific aspect of this realm and its competing models.
ABOVE - Dead Internet
Isolation
Mouse Arrow
The cursor is the smallest avatar of the digital self: a pointed abstraction of our presence. Yet it also reduces us to data.
As we navigate interfaces built to classify and monetize, the arrow becomes a symbol of isolation: a lone pointer moving through curated spaces, separated from others by design. We click, drag, hover, but never touch. In the kingdom of targeted advertising, isolation is the environmental condition of being rendered legible.
Dissociation
Astral Projection
To drift outside one’s body was once a mystical practice: an escape into the astral plane, a journey beyond the self.
Now dissociation is woven into the architecture of digital life. We scroll until our limbs go numb, float through feeds that detach us from physical sensation. We leave ourselves without ever leaving the chair. The astral projection of the internet age is unintentional: a dislocation from our own bodies, induced by endless stimulation and placelessness.
Derealization
VR Headset
The headset promises immersion, but often delivers estrangement. Behind the plastic visor, the world becomes a simulation of itself.
VR does not simply create new realities; it destabilizes the one we inhabit. The boundary between play and world, between illusion and memory, begins to melt. Everything feels slightly off, as if the texture of reality has been wiped clean. Derealization becomes a side effect of immersion: a sick joke that lingers after we remove the headset.
Polarization
Chained Troll:
Trolling began as a mischievous spark: irreverent, disruptive, a weapon of the powerless used to puncture authority.
But the powerful learned its grammar. They industrialized provocation, institutionalized outrage, weaponized irony. The troll became chained to the goals of propaganda, no longer a rebel but a tool. Polarization thrives on this transformation. The troll, once a trickster, now serves as an amplifier of division, serving those who profit from chaos.
Troll Farms / Bot Farms
Manipulation
Armies of automated accounts, generating floods of content indistinguishable from human speech. Entire realities are manufactured in server rooms.
Manipulation becomes infrastructural. The digital commons turns into a battlefield where narratives are engineered, emotions harvested, and beliefs shaped at an industrial scale. When bots outnumber human voices, democracy degenerates into noise. Soon, the longing for order and clarity slips into nostalgia for the steady hand of authoritarianism.
Fragmentation
Broken Vase
A vase shattered on the floor does not return to its original form; it becomes an assemblage of what once was whole.
Our shared reality feels the same: cracked by misinformation, splintered by feeds, dissolved into shards of incompatible truths. Fragmentation is not simply confusion: it has become structural. Platforms profit from this brokenness. The more fractured our perception, the easier we are to steer, target, optimize, and control.
Below - Hive Mind
Cooperate
A Swarm of Cursors
One cursor equals one isolated user. Many cursors – flashing, dancing, overlapping on the same screen – reveal a different paradigm.
In collaborative tools, multiple cursors animate a shared intention: a live choreography of collective intelligence. The screen becomes a commons, and thinking becomes communal. Cursors multiply like neurons, bridging minds across distance. Coordination reveals the potential to become a visible form of care.
Organize
Beehive
A hive is more than a colony; it is a living system of mutual reliance, where each worker contributes to the survival of the whole.
The beehive symbolizes the power of organized labour, the strength found in coordinated action and shared infrastructures rather than isolated effort. In a world obsessed with individualism, the hive reminds us that true transformation can be achieved only through continuous collective movement, not solitary struggle.
Include
Hands / Pawprints
Not all users are human. Digital ecosystems shape the lives of animals, machines, and landscapes as much as they shape us.
Handprints and pawprints together evoke a posthuman politics: one that expands participation beyond the human species. Inclusion means recognizing multispecies entanglements, designing systems that account for the more-than-human world, and treating technology as part of a larger ecology rather than a human playground.
Fluidify
Avatar / Threshold
Avatars are liminal beings, neither fully self nor fully fiction. They occupy thresholds between realities, enabling us to slip into new forms.
“On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog”: this old meme is a vivid reminder that online identities are changeable and playful, unbound by physical constraints. Avatars invite us to inhabit multiplicity, treating identity as an interface rather than an essence. Digital fluidity can become a gateway to (re)discovering the self.
Self-Organise
Hacker Symbol
The glider pattern in Conway’s Game of Life became a symbol for self-organization: complexity arising from minimal rules.
Hackers embrace this logic: autonomy built from simple principles of openness, decentralization, curiosity, and rebellion. Autonomy is not isolation; it is the capacity to self-organise, to build systems that exceed their constraints, to scale freedom across time and space. The higher the complexity, the more important self-organisation becomes.
Collectivise
Flock of Ducks
Ducks, humble and communal, move as a flock with quiet coordination. Their collective intelligence is not hierarchical but relational.
The flock symbolizes humility, cooperation, and the wisdom born from distributed movement. Each duck watches the others, adjusts its pace, and responds to shifting currents in real time. To act like a flock of ducks is to trust in collective direction, to find strength in shared velocity, to move as many without losing oneself as one.
THE (W)HOLE REPOSITORY
Congratulations on making it this far!
In the section below, you will find a carefully curated list of online resources that aim to study, critique, and improve the vast world of digital infrastructures, with a special focus on the topics presented in this realm. If you like this section, please make sure to visit the main page of our repository, where you will find many more links from all the other realms of the (W)HOLE project.
Art
Gathering Softly – A Digital Gallery for Care and Connection
Care
Community
Accessibility
Summary
An online exhibition exploring intimacy and relational care through digital artworks, inviting viewers into gentle, participatory encounters that reimagine how we gather and connect online.
Post Growth – Art-research toolkit for degrowth futures
Sustainability
Circular Economies
Environmental Justice
Summary
Interactive tools, videos, and workshop materials to rethink growth. Explore energy, labor, and planetary limits; use cards and exercises to spark classroom and community discussions.
Phantom Islands is a sound atlas of imagined islands plotted on maps. Mixing field recordings, archives, and synthesis, it explores how fiction and data blur the line between place and imagination.
A Warm Database by Ganesh and Ghani explores disappearance, visibility, and representation, imagining a living archive of resistance that challenges bureaucratic and state-driven data regimes.
Imperfect Archiving: Archiving as Practice for a Love of Softness - Center for Book Arts
Care
Commons
Knowledge
Summary
A zine exploring archiving as a tender and political act, embracing imperfection, emotional memory, and softness as tools for feminist and collective preservation.
ARECACEAE is a poetic web experiment intertwining botany, computation, and digital aesthetics. Through algorithmic imagery of palm trees, it reflects on the artificial reproduction of nature and the ecological implications of digital simulation.
A digital art project that turns the idea of a computer virus into a poetic metaphor for resistance, contamination, and creative disruption within algorithmic culture.
An interactive publication exploring emotional labor and care work through digital design. It challenges efficiency culture and foregrounds affect as a form of resistance.
Playful web sketches that treat HTTP, headers, and status codes as poetry. Fork and remix tiny experiments to learn the web by making protocol-driven artworks.
Sarah Holloway’s online artworks experiment with visibility, intimacy, and digital embodiment through poetic coding and narrative play. Her projects explore refusal, disguise, and agency in networked environments.
An evolving artistic and research platform exploring interspecies communication and shared ecologies, proposing care and empathy as foundations for multispecies coexistence.
Kool Aid Factory – Playful web studio & experiments
Open Knowledge
Summary
A creative studio making playful websites, web-to-print, and design experiments. Explore projects, toolkits, and resources blending culture, code, and accessible storytelling.
An ongoing art project by Mimi Onuoha that documents and visualizes datasets that don’t exist-topics systematically ignored or uncollected by governments and corporations. The work exposes how power operates through omission, making invisibility itself a site of critique.
Google Faces – Finding faces in Earth’s landscapes
Open Knowledge
Transparency
Summary
Onformative’s bot scans Google Maps with face-tracking to simulate pareidolia-spotting face-like shapes in mountains, deserts, and coasts. An art experiment in perception and machine vision.
An experimental Tumblr archive documenting DIY and open-source furniture design. OS Furnitures celebrates material simplicity, reuse, and local autonomy as aesthetic and political gestures against mass production.
Deploys a Wi-Fi hotspot sculpture that routes all traffic through the Tor network and acts as a Tor relay, reclaiming museum internet as an anonymity tool.
PLANT is an experimental web project that visualizes the internet as a living ecosystem. Through interactive design and generative visuals, it reveals the organic and unstable nature of digital networks while proposing a more ecological, symbiotic view of computation.
The Internet is Fun! is a playful web-based artwork that critiques the commercialization of online joy. Through interactive design and nostalgic aesthetics, it reclaims the internet’s early spirit of experimentation, humor, and collective play.
MacPictures revisits early digital image-making through the lens of artificial intelligence. By blending obsolete computing aesthetics with generative algorithms, the work questions the fetishization of “intelligent” systems and the myth of technological progress.
A digital art organisation supporting born-digital cultural practices through exhibitions, research, preservation tools, and community programs that nurture experimental, accessible digital creativity.
Jorge² is a poetic and experimental web project that blurs human and machine communication. Through layered text, fragmented dialogue, and generative interaction, it questions authorship, algorithmic agency, and the politics of voice in digital environments.
Artist Beatrix Pang’s channel with short films, documentation of exhibitions, talks, and workshops across art, publishing, and community. Browse videos and follow for updates.
1-Star Review Tour – The Weight of Data (Chronus Art Center)
Exploitation
Subversion
Counter Datasets
Summary
1-Star Review Tour is an online art project that visualizes and performs the hidden labor behind digital ratings and data extraction. It transforms algorithmic reviews into an act of resistance, questioning the affective and economic infrastructures of platform economies.
Cristóbal Parra – Media arts, generative image & territory
Open Knowledge
Summary
Portfolio of a Chilean media artist: generative image, photography, mixed media, and A/V live. Projects like “Fósiles Futuros” and “Andalién 19/31”; themes of territory, body, Biobío.
Hallucinations is an experimental art project exploring the blurred boundary between human imagination and AI-generated imagery. By visualizing algorithmic “dreams,” it questions authorship, perception, and the seductive power of machine hallucinations.
Studio exploring plants, soil, water & stone to grow ecosystems. Site-specific, experimental work across DE/JP/CH; blends digital+analog tools. Guest professor at TU Dresden.
MercuryOS is a conceptual design project that reimagines the operating system as an artistic and critical medium. Its Art Direction section reflects on aesthetics, control, and resistance in digital interfaces, challenging the ideology of seamless technology.
Peculiar Manicule is a hybrid design and research platform exploring typographic heritage, print culture, and collective authorship. Through open projects and publishing experiments, it reimagines design as shared knowledge and cultural care.
Queer Futurism: Denizens of Liminality – Queer Nature
Intersectionality
Decolonialism
Sustainability
Summary
A poetic exploration of queer futurism and ecological kinship, this project reimagines survival and belonging beyond binaries, blending decolonial ecology with speculative storytelling.
Ritual Inhabitual is an art and research collective creating performances, installations, and workshops centered on embodied care and feminist resistance to productivity culture.
The Toaster Project – Making a toaster from scratch
Resources
Exploitation
Alternatives
Summary
Designer Thomas Thwaites mines, smelts, and molds parts to build a £4.99 toaster from raw materials-exposing hidden supply chains, industrial complexity, and the limits of DIY.
The personal website and portfolio of artist YH Song, presenting poetic, intimate digital works that explore relationships, vulnerability, and the gentle social dynamics of online and offline interaction.
A collaboration between disabled artists framing alt-text as poetry, offering workshops and a workbook to promote accessible, creative image description across digital spaces.
A digital magazine exploring aesthetic and political forms of technological failure, glitch, and resistance, turning digital “damage” into a critical and poetic gesture.
A personal web project blending performance, coding, and self-archiving to explore identity, visibility, and refusal within online spaces through playful and poetic web design.
An interactive art project offering guided tours through the early internet’s aesthetics, interfaces, and communities, reimagining digital nostalgia as collective memory and critique.
An experimental web project exploring self-exposure, vulnerability, and the blurred boundaries between intimacy and surveillance in digital environments.
An artistic web project exploring extraction, land, and digital colonialism, connecting ecological degradation with the invisible infrastructures powering global computation.
A minimalist web platform that delivers a new poem each day, inviting quiet reflection and offering a gentle, human-centered digital experience beyond constant stimulation.
An artist-led publishing project exploring the intersection of print and the web, collecting works that remix online material into physical forms of networked art.
An experimental online space hosting collaborative art, code, and text projects that question authorship, participation, and the social dynamics of digital creation.
