Were used to following instructions. The pandemic has only increased our need to be told what to do: Everywhere, lines of security tape delimited the spaces we could go, or where we could sit. While we navigate a changing environment, looking for directions and adapting to circumstances, we try to improve, to learn something new, to keep calm, to do more exercise. Meanwhile, the platforms and apps we use apply the algorithms designed by their developers to cater to our needs, customize our experiences, and gently influence our behavior. Instructions follow: As we move into the future, there will continue to be more indications, regulations, and control placed over us. The artworks in this exhibition explore our relationships with digital devices and information systems from the perspectives of both humans and machines, as a way to reflect on how our present time is governed by codes, regulations, and defaults. Pau Waelder

Feral File  Instructions Follow

Joana Moll conceived &ldquo;Ultimate Solvers&rdquo; as a critical reflection on the promises of the technological sector, with companies confidently asserting that all problems can be fixed with large amounts of data and software. While global emergencies such as climate change and the COVID pandemic (not to mention other social, political, and economic crises) cannot be solved with an app, corporations still rely on techno-solutionism, which contributes to the obfuscation of these realities. Blindly relying on technology also prevents users from questioning what lies behind the solutions that these companies are offering, and from questioning how efficient they really are.

The artwork collects a series of slogans, brand identities, and stock images used by the major companies in the IT sector to sell their products. These are endlessly combined and repeated, showing to what extent these sentences are vague, empty of meaning, interchangeable, and generic. However, they also reveal the companies&rsquo; underlying ambition to control and shape the world through information analysis and predictive algorithms, which is a disturbing prospect for a society in which everything has become a resource to extract data and labor from.

&ldquo;Ultimate Solvers&rdquo; was originally commissioned by HeK (Haus der elektronischen K&uuml;nste Basel) as part of the Hek Net Works program.