System Acknowledged
20 Weeks, Summer 2025
Individual Art Project during my Erasmus exchange program in Kunstuni Linz
# InteractiveInstallation
# ESP32
# ElectronicArt
# InstitutionsAndRights
# Sci-Fi Aesthetic
# ArsElectronica
When facing such an enormous structure, women as individuals often fall into a sense of powerlessness and rejection.
Yet I began to ask myself—how can I turn this complex, tangled emotion I feel in a certain context into an experience, one that allows people from different contexts to sense what I am feeling?
Later, I realized that this experience of “rejection” is not exclusive to the identity of being a woman. It also exists within bureaucratic institutions, government systems, and any kind of power machinery. It is a vast system—a hierarchy of gatekeepers and a language mechanism that dissolves individual voices through layers of procedural rationality and scripted rhetoric.
I wanted to materialize this abstract, collective experience into an interactive installation: the audience “submits” their voices, which are filtered through multiple layers but never accepted. The responses displayed on the screens are calm, absurd, and tinted with bureaucratic rhetoric.
During the creation of this system, I found myself in a contradictory position. As an artist, I was both the oppressed and the designer—I had to construct and simulate the very patriarchal language system I was trying to critique, using it to respond to and reject the audience’s voices. Even though I knew how crude and imperfect it was, I still had to maintain a façade of “reasonableness.” That tension itself became part of the experience—an embodied contradiction between control and resistance.
What’s also fascinating is how audiences from different backgrounds respond differently. In conversation with an Iranian participant, he related the piece to recent events in his country, seeing it as not only about patriarchy but also about suffocating governmental and bureaucratic systems. Some white male viewers, however, approached it as a kind of puzzle—they kept trying to be “accepted,” unaware that acceptance was never programmed to happen. This repeated confidence revealed how rarely they experience rejection in real life. For those who come from oppressed or marginalized backgrounds, though, this refusal often triggered deeper resonance—or even stress. These contrasts reveal how the feeling and coping of “rejection” vary across cultural and social experiences.
Interactive Narrative
The first two layers decide with pure randomness (50/50 each). The final layer always rejects (100%). The overall acceptance rate is thus 0%. This rigged logic stages a sci-fi bureaucracy that is procedural yet indifferent to content and meaning.
The structure is transparent—open-frame acrylic with exposed electronics. By making circuitry and design choices visible, the piece demystifies authority and reframes power as banal, legible, and a little funny.
Tokens are screened, then screened again—only to meet a guaranteed refusal at the final gate. Visitors cannot access the real cause of rejection; instead, each screen outputs bureaucratic, seemingly reasonable phrases that rationalize the outcome. The work choreographs a felt helplessness and a dry humor, exposing the arbitrariness and opacity of patriarchal gatekeeping.
*Sketch of the Exhibition Setting
Voice Token Design
In the design of the Voice Tokens, I selected five pairs of contrasting phrases to reveal the tension between personal experiences — as if spoken by the individuals themselves — and the systemic rhetoric that disguises or neutralizes those experiences.
“It was discipline, but they called it nature.”
“It was violence, yet they called it discipline.”
“It was neglect, but they disguised it as freedom.”
“It was trafficking, but they called it adoption.”
“It was rejection, but they called it evaluation.”
Each token is printed with one of these voices.
The audience is invited to select a token and deliver it into the the physical installation.
*Photo of the voice token during exhibition
Device Structure
Materials: laser-cut transparent acrylic, standard M-series standoffs/screws, off-the-shelf TFT SPI modules, tactile buttons, ESP32 dev board. The open layout intentionally “shows the work” to demystify the adjudication mechanism.
*Model Image
Gallery
Recognition
Interviewed by UK art group JustArtCollective; work featured in their print publication, Volume #2 Fall 2025