Split-screen perception becomes a governing metaphor for how memory sutures porn spectacle, documentary Orientalism, and nuclear media into a single apparatus of looking, where meaning is produced through apophenic/patternic connections across competing screens, archives, and afterimages. Feminist and queer critique threads through this media ecology to expose how bodies (genitals, gender, laboring women, irradiated workers) are commodified, disciplined, and contaminated by technocapitalism and state power, while the text tests whether montage, archival debris, and imagined apocalypse can interrupt the loop binding sex, violence, and exchange.

Sarcastic post-internet spectacle is framed as an institutional attitude that normalizes complicity, collapsing critique into branding and turning the biennial into a showroom for neoliberal subjectivities (self-optimization, novelty fetish, “indebted man”) rather than a site for countercultural or counterfinancial agency. Against this corporatized genre-fication and “fear of failure,” the text calls for hybrid, time-sensitive strategies that confront debt, militarized information technologies, and urban/colonial governance—rejecting mimicry and ironic nihilism in favor of materially engaged, politically accountable art production.

A shift from lens-based photography’s contingent co-production of world and author toward computational image regimes (3-D, scanning, algorithmic capture) collapses the gap between perception and signal, replacing modern “magic” and emancipation with total fabrication, security logics, and a return of the tableau/masterpiece as ideology. Drawing on Flusser, Baudrillard, and psychoanalytic distinctions between Vorstellung and Bewusstsein, this condition is framed as a culturally generalized madness in which subjects are deluded into believing they still contribute a viewpoint, even as automated systems pre-compose memory-conforming images and render the lens—and with it photographic authorship—silent.

Art’s claim to truth is reframed from communicative persuasion (shared language, belief, propaganda) to technological world-making and conservation, where avant-garde strategies transform subjects by altering environments and suspending the logic of progressive replacement. With the internet’s collapse of production and exhibition into profane documentation under an algorithmic gaze, artistic “surplus of vision” shifts from the artist to computation, making art paradigmatic as a politics of nonidentity—strategic disidentification from imposed taxonomies enabled by decontextualizing, recontextualizing archives.

Gothic tropes re-emerge in post-internet moving-image art as a cultural technology for metabolizing the digital uncanny: the animation of objects, ghostly mediation, and the intrusion of networked systems into the home re-stage Victorian-era anxieties around modernization, immateriality, and agency. By foregrounding domestic architecture, hybrid media, and prop-relic installations, these works critique how internet culture reorganizes subjectivity and kinship—shifting from collective to atomized viewing—while insisting that contemporary digital aesthetics remain historically haunted, psychologically charged, and materially contested.

Post–Cold War globalization and the internet are framed as twin infrastructures through which capital supplants politics and history, converting “cultural exchange” into an abstract, spectacular regime that flattens difference while masking new forms of governance and coercion. Against this backdrop—marked by ecological catastrophe and the exhaustion of modernist universalism as well as reactionary cultural withdrawal—the text asks what kind of art can exceed culture’s representational apparatus and confront humanity’s entangled toxicity at a possible endpoint of cultural-technological life.