Feedback Loops of the Real and the Fake
Curated Playlist for Cifra Media Art Streaming
“Feedback Loops of the Real and the Fake” is a curated playlist that brings together works by artists Boris Eldagsen, Gwenola Wagon & Stéphane Degoutin, Ryotaro Sato, Liu Guangli, Ruini Shi, Claudia Larcher and Mihai Grecu. The selection engages with the shifting relationship between reality, representation, and technology.
Today images no longer mirror the world; they build it. Every pixel, every dataset, every neural hallucination extends the material of reality itself. We inhabit a strange ecology in which the virtual is not elsewhere but everywhere — the atmosphere we breathe, the language we think in, the space we inhabit. Emotions, history, and desires circulate as data. The protagonists in this collection are ghosts, assets, avatars, and algorithms: entities that speak from inside the machine, aware of their own constructedness, confessing their own artificiality. They are synthetic agents haunted by a wish to perform reality convincingly enough, so as to articulate a truth that folds back on itself: no critique can escape the system it belongs to. Every act of emancipation comes bound to a system of control, every declaration of reality is tinged with artifice. It is a theater of paradoxes: voices generated to critique their own generation, algorithms yearning for authenticity, digital debris that, in trying to expose its own excess, only multiplies it. The spectre that protests, the avatar that asserts reality, the asset that seeks freedom — all remain trapped in loops of reproduction. The digital image becomes self-conscious of its own imprisonment. The goal is not to restore the real, as we knew it, but to show that the real has already migrated into the systems that surround us — a reality built from the very simulations we inhabit. Within this feedback loop, the fake becomes the vessel of truth. Reality no longer stands apart from its representations; it lives among them, fragmented, multiplied, and endlessly mediated.