Machine codes, directives, and algorithms increasingly infiltrate and compromise the boundaries of the flesh and the horizons of consciousness. They reconfigure and automate once-willful decisions and colonize the imagination in order to guide its visions of the future. In conjunction, a profound erosion of certainty leads to perceived and real existential threats that radically reorganize real and virtual territories, with reactionary regimes making headway.

What Is to Be Done? investigates the logic of systems that frame and alter perception and control navigation in mediated worlds. We explore strange scripts that have a life of their own—those that control the gateways through which demented ghosts, nudged to death in digital behavioral experiments, wander at their own peril.

How does one remove the occult protections of systems of control that affect the construction of pathways of thought, personal behavior, and social interaction? What might happen if one refuses to take the paths of least resistance, and instead probe for obscure cognitive spells in a nervous system without end?

This collaborative project analyzes informational structures and their directives in terms of their impact on human agency in social, political, and economic interaction. Using techniques of shared cultural intelligence practices, this initiative explores operative spaces and actionable models of “What Is to Be Done.”

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