Floating in a Fleeting World of Images

Installation Design, Speculative Research, Arduino Interactivity, Fabrication, Projection Mapping, Audio System, Graphic Design

The images we encounter online move too quickly to register, appearing as fragments rather than whole. This interactive installation works with that volatility, allowing digital debris to pass through a shifting environment that never quite lets an image settle. What appears is always on the verge of forming; familiar for a moment, then slipping away again. The work approaches internet images as something already unstable, shaped less by what they depict and more by how endlessly they circulate, mutate, and detach from their origins. By treating these fragments as material, the installation “tunes into” the parts of the internet we rarely pay attention to: the templates, misread emotions, and recycled symbols that slip quietly into our vision and shape us without announcement. What emerges is not clarity but a brief kind of visibility, a moment when an image wavers, breaks from its usual format, and reveals the structures moving beneath it.

For this installation, I worked with image datasets of cats, adult content, memes, face recognition, pepe/wojak memes and QAnon posts, treating them less as categories and more as raw visual material. These particular datasets matter because they sit at the core of how the contemporary internet “sees” us. Cute cats and memes are the friendly surface layer; face-recognition and adult-content archives are the infrastructure of surveillance and desire; Pepe/wojak and QAnon images sit at the edge of conspiracy and political myth-making. What happens when we stop treating these images as disposable noise or neutral data, and instead sit with them in their unstable state, as debris, as material, as something that is already acting on us even when we barely register that we’ve seen it?

The work runs as a feedback loop between image, sound, and water. Viewers can surf through different frequencies, slightly shifting what becomes visible, but never fully controlling it. Certain settings bring fragments into brief legibility before they slip back into abstraction, so you are always tuning in and out of visibility rather than arriving at a final image.