PROGRAMMWAHL

In the developmental phase of my wall object, immediately preceding the 2025 federal election in Germany, the satellite dish became an almost prehistoric yet highly charged symbol for me: it represents reception, the filtering of information, and the neural networking of a society. But what happens when the signals shift?

The hooked crosses that I incorporated into the object are a direct response to the palpable rightward shift in current politics. They mark a painful turning point.

However, what troubled me most was the question of visibility. In a collateral experiment, I uploaded the swastika motif to common image search engines and LLMs like ChatGPT. The result is as revealing as it is frightening: none of the AIs recognized the symbol in its political dimension. Instead, it was identified as a harmless everyday object, such as a clothes hanger.

For me, this digital blindness is more than a technical glitch. It is a metaphor for a society that can not or will not name the obvious any longer. In my work, I confront the physical presence of this sign with its algorithmic trivialization. It is about the gap between what we see and what the systems mirror back to us. The wall object functions here as a jammer: it brings the repressed symbolism back from digital camouflage into the physical space, where it can no longer be clicked away or harmlessly reinterpreted.