Agency of Nowhen

Artist and CGI specialist Sara Culmann often works with digital drawing, creating scenes in a game engine and matching her lines of research with machinima poetics. Agency of Nowhen is an online platform with short videos imitating the logic of paid content services. The project describes diverse aspects of the phenomenon of bias‑cognitive distortion of the perception of information that creates an imbalance in collective knowledge.

These episodes combine into a series of video essays exploring individual incidences of the deformation of data and the problems of measuring systems. A number of the subjects are based on a careful study of digital environments, for example the one about the production of a consensus of knowledge in Wikipedia, which is narrated by an anonymous Wiki editor who handles arguments about universality and systems for selecting and checking information. Others offer a poetic and experimental exploration of the experience of the subject’s existence in the extremely heterogeneous and randomly technogenic present day. The artist pays particular attention to failed historical lines, experiences not taken into account by society, and elements that have avoided scientific analysis.

By using a type of streaming interface and splitting the work into short episodes, the artist plays with how knowledge is distributed and how the image is circulated today: in ways that are illusory, accessible, universal, and ephemeral.