There is a place where art doesn’t settle on walls, it runs through cables, hums between fans, flickers across half-lit screens. A space that doesn’t exhibit, but hosts, not a work, but a condition. Here, matter becomes system, form becomes function, and thought nests within interfaces. No longer representation, but living infrastructure, raw, exposed, essential.

Everything is stripped to its core, and it’s there, in the minimum, that the maximum tension surfaces: the gesture that removes in order to reveal, that brings into view what is usually concealed, the skeleton of connection, the anatomy of play, the bare logic of machines. No symbols, only function. No fetish, only possibility.

Yet within this precision, a crack opens to disorder. Architecture becomes a network node, an active platform, a field where rules bend to allow chance, chaos, and collective improvisation. Yes, it’s play, but play not as escape, rather as contact, as traversal, as deviation. Art as server, a machine that offers no visions, only access…

With LAN, Brennan Wojtyla transforms TICK TACK into an immersive installation that fuses gameplay, network infrastructure, and architecture, merging early 2000s LAN party culture with the concrete brutality of De Zonnewijzer. The exhibition moves fluidly between digital nostalgia and spatial manipulation, between participatory culture and infrastructural reflection. At FakeWhale, we spoke with Brennan to dive deeper into the concepts, motivations, and implications behind this radical intervention.

Fakewhale: Dear Brennan, With LAN, your project at TICK TACK seems to unfold as a single gesture where space, play, and community become an inseparable experience. What was the initial spark for LAN, and how did you decide to bring these seemingly disparate elements into dialogue?

The idea of doing a LAN party in a gallery/fine art context was something brought up as a joke between friends originally. In an attempt to make work more fun, the injection of video games into fine art spaces sat at the back of my to-do list for some time. But it wasn’t until TICK TACK introduced doing an eSports event that I started taking the idea “seriously.” The whole exhibition is a balance between manufactured and DIY elements. It was a careful dance of materials, staging, and conceptual decisions that took a long time to fully realize. (…)

Starting from the brutalist architecture of De Zonnewijzer, you transformed the entire building into a network node and interactive sculpture. How did you engage with the physical space, and how did it shape the project’s conceptual and technical decisions?

I have been a massive fan of Brutalism for a long time, and it was such a pleasure to show in such an iconic building. I wanted to amplify the building’s architectural strengths. A big inspiration for how you can occupy the space at TICK TACK was their previous exhibition Elektrosex with Michael Sailstorfer. I knew I wanted to utilize the atrium space so people would have a full view of the cables. Having the CPU cluster on the top floor resulted in some unique problems to solve. One of which was the fact that the USB signal dies after 5 meters, meaning if we just used USB, the second desk in the back would not be able to use a mouse or keyboard. To solve this issue, we used passive USB > Ethernet and Ethernet > USB adapters. Such a weird and surprisingly functional solution, and now I have 20 of these funny dongles. (…)

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From the very beginning, Alexander Endrullat’s work caught our attention for its ability to deconstruct the language of technological objects, transforming them into sensitive surfaces, narrative tools, and at times, ghostly visual traces. Spanning from printing with obsolete laptops to pinhole photography sent as postcards, their practice questions our assumptions around function, identity, memory, and value. In this conversation with Fakewhale, we delve into the mechanics of their creative process, their fascination with error and obsolescence, the role of writing, and the unexplored potential of the digital devices that shape our everyday lives.

Fakewhale: How do you manage to combine your artistic expression, which combines meticulous craftsmanship with an exploration of the boundaries of media, with a balance between experimentation and tradition?

Alexander Endrullat: I don’t see craftsmanship, tradition, and experimentation as contradictory, but rather as an interplay that gives rise to new forms and meanings. Many of my works are created using traditional processes such as printing or analog photography, but I deliberately alienate and technically overstretch them. I am interested in how far a medium or material can be pushed before it loses its function, or something new emerges from it. The line between control and chance, between craftsmanship and spontaneous intervention, is the most productive moment for me.

This creates a balance between tradition and experimentation, in which the craftsmanship provides the foundation that makes the freedom of play possible. (...)

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What separates being from system is becoming almost imperceptible.

Inspired by the visionary Ghost in the Shell, Emi Kusano’s first solo show in New York examines this uncertainty in the age of AI. In EGO in the Shell, she explores how algorithms capture, filter, and refract us, rendering every gesture and emotion.

A Tokyo-based multidisciplinary artist, Kusano works across emergent technologies and digital media. She has been instrumental in bringing AI-generated art to a wider audience, translating intricate computational processes into experiences that feel alive. Her work in this exhibition reflects the paradox of selfhood today: we craft and ego-post endlessly, while what remains is transient. Through synthetic childhoods, holograms, and tech relics, Kusano asks what traces of ourselves survive when distilled into code.

The exhibition opens at Offline Gallery—the physical space run by the SuperRare team—and is co-curated by Offline director Mika Bar-On Nesher and guest curator Yohsuke Takahashi. It engages directly with the landmark anime and manga series, Ghost in the Shell, which first envisioned brain-computer interfaces, networked consciousness, and the evanescent “ghost” in the machine.

In the following Q&A, I asked Kusano to explain the influence of Shirow’s masterpiece on her thinking and the development of the exhibition.

In EGO in the Shell, AI is basically co-authoring the content. Do you think of it more like a creative partner or maybe a trickster that messes with your sense of you?

AI is never just one of these things. It’s a partner that thinks alongside me, a mirror reflecting parts of myself I don’t always want to see. At times, it manifests as an ethereal presence, inseparably intertwined with me.

In my artistic process, it moves beyond being a tool and becomes almost a shared consciousness. That ambiguity helps keep the work authentic.

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What if machines have started dreaming of us? What happens when their silence fills with echoes of our language, absorbed, imitated, reinvented by an intelligence that isn’t ours, yet knows us too well? As we stepped into Radiances (2.0), this thought lingered: if God were an algorithm, then prayer would be a glitch. There was no silence, yet everything spoke, the fog, the stroboscopic lights, the walls holding the electronic breath of what had long been forsaken. This is not a space to pass through, it’s a space that passes through you, consumes you, then gives you back, altered. A digital crypt, a labyrinth where ancient rites are performed by bodiless presences.

The installation at the Ostrale Biennale (June 7 – October 5, 2025), curated by Drorit Gur Arie, breathes with the fever of neon dreams. Slavin inhabits a subterranean void and transforms it into a techno-mystical altar. Everything vibrates, there is no stillness, only an unceasing stream of images, sounds, presences. We don’t walk, we float, as if immersed in a liquid architecture where every step is an algorithmic decision. The virtual bodies on screen, avatars in decay or transformation, don’t comfort. They question, unsettle, sometimes seduce. At the center stands Radiant, an androgynous, hyper-real figure that embodies ambiguity, both puppet and oracle, mask and emerging consciousness, instrument and prophet. (…)

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Liminal Ring (2024) by Jin Lee caught our attention for its subtle yet powerful reflection on how humans try to control natural forces, and where that ambition falls short. With its use of 384 laminar-flow fans set against the unpredictable nature of turbulence, the work becomes a meditation on the limits of certainty, the illusions of mastery, and the fragile balance between order and chaos. Through this installation, Jin Lee invites us to reconsider the relationship between human intervention and the irreducible complexity of nature, prompting a deeper look at the systems we build and the forces we can never fully tame.

Fakewhale: Liminal Ring plays with the tension between natural chaos and artificial control. What first sparked your interest in exploring this balance?

Jin Lee: I’ve long been fascinated by humanity’s desire to impose order on a world that is, by its nature, beyond complete control. In both natural and technological systems, I am drawn to that fragile boundary where order dissolves into chaos — where our understanding and control begin to lose their stability.

Liminal Ring emerged from this recognition. My practice often involves electronic circuits and code-based systems designed for precision and predictability — symbols of human control. Yet, when these artificial systems encounter natural elements such as turbulent flow, their inherent limitations become visible. Through this confrontation, the work reveals the tension between human intent and the indeterminate vitality of nature — a reminder that even our most refined systems remain temporary gestures within a larger, uncontrollable order. (…)

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There’s something profoundly tactile, though entirely invisible,in the installations of KiefferWoodtli. Their work doesn’t just ask to be observed; it moves through you. Blending ecology, sound, and sensory perception, the Swiss duo builds environments where the relationship between humans and nature isn’t just a theme, but a living, reactive material. In Arboreal Severance, presented within the almost diplomatic framework of the Planetary Embassy by Swissnex in New York, KiefferWoodtli turns the space into a sentient system that listens and responds. Unlike Arboreal Serenade, which embraced symbiosis, this new work speaks of distance, rupture, and absence. The sound here doesn’t comfort , it fractures, withdraws, and falls silent when we enter. As if to remind us that something in the way we inhabit the Earth has been irreversibly severed.  .

Fakewhale: Could you tell us how you came together as a duo and how your artistic journey began? 

KiefferWoodtli: When we met in Zurich 2019, we were both already pursuing our own artistic paths, yet what instantly connected us was a shared philosophical curiosity. A need to question everything. Each of us had independently decided to leave Switzerland and travel, and soon after, we set out together for Central America. When the pandemic arrived, we found ourselves “stranded” in Costa Rica, surrounded by nature that was, in many ways, healing itself in the absence of human interference. 

Watching this quiet regeneration reshaped our perspective. Our daily conversations – about perception, time, and the living systems around us – became the foundation of a shared language. From the beginning, it wasn’t about forming a collective, but about finding a way to express what neither of us could articulate alone. 

Working together allowed us to think in layers. To merge intuition and structure, concept and emotion. Nature became both our teacher and our laboratory, a source of reflection and material for creation. Out of that dialogue, our first joint works began to take shape. (…)

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That wraps this week’s issue of the Fakewhale Newsletter, be sure to check in for the next one for more insights into the Fakewhale ecosystem!