Curating the Self: Augmented Capitalism and Generative AI for Immanent Critique

This project examines how contemporary platform systems transform the production, circulation, and value of identity. It argues that digital culture has moved beyond representational models toward computational forms of mediation, in which identities are continuously generated, classified, and circulated through algorithmic processes. In this context, the self is no longer simply expressed but actively produced as data—shaped by infrastructures that optimise visibility, engagement, and value extraction.

​

The project introduces the concept of augmented capitalism to describe this emerging phase, where platform systems and artificial intelligence operationalise and automate the commodification of identity. Rather than treating digital culture through frameworks of spectacle or attention alone, it foregrounds the role of computation in structuring subjectivity itself.

​

The research is both theoretical and practice-based. Alongside conceptual analysis, it develops a generative AI system that translates these ideas into a working computational model. This system produces and recombines moving images in real time, allowing its internal processes to become visible. Rather than critiquing platform systems from the outside, the project adopts an immanent methodology, engaging systems through their own operational logic.

​

Through this approach, the work explores how critique can emerge from within computation—through disruption, distributed agency, and the exposure of system behaviour. The outputs are not simply artworks, but instances of system activity that reveal how identity is continuously processed and reshaped.

​

By positioning artificial intelligence as both subject and method, Curating the Self contributes a new framework for understanding identity under contemporary capitalism. It suggests that the critical challenge is no longer how to represent systems of power, but how to operate within and against them.