Adversarial Aesthetics

Algorithmic systems produce their own aesthetics: the corporate infographic that flattens decision trees into tidy boxes, the engagement-maximising image that rewards outrage, the star rating that reduces a performance to a number. Each of these surfaces is a compression, and each compression is where the politics of the system get hidden.

The three works gathered here treat those surfaces as material. Jonas Lund builds his own systems diagram and lets its composure do the critique. Eva and Franco Mattes turn a trivial cat image into a trap for the attention economy that shares it. Jinwon Lee wears the machinery of the platform review on the body, turning a disposable receipt into a performance that refuses to be consumed and forgotten.

None of these pieces explain algorithmic harm from the outside. They inhabit the visual language the systems have trained viewers to read quickly, and then slow that reading down until the language breaks.