The Prior is a collection of three conceptual art pieces that examine how algorithmic systems shape us. Each piece makes visible a different mechanism: prediction colonizes the future, injection installs the present, and the feed captures attention. Together, they form a portrait of how these systems don't just observe us—they construct us.
The Forecast asks five questions and generates a detailed prediction of your future self. The prediction feels uncomfortably accurate. It might be. Or it might be a mirror angled to catch whatever you're already looking for.
The piece doesn't resolve this ambiguity. That's the point. Living under algorithmic prediction means never knowing if you've been seen or reduced, understood or merely modeled. The system's confidence is indistinguishable from its accuracy. And your resistance—your skepticism, your attempts to game the questions—is already factored in.
This is prediction as colonization. Not prophecy—prediction. Prophecy claims to see what will happen. Prediction claims to know what you'll do, and then builds the world around that knowledge until the gap between forecast and reality closes. Not because the forecast was right, but because it made itself right.
Recommendation engines, credit scores, hiring algorithms—they don't just guess what you'll do. They shape what you're allowed to do. The future they predict becomes the only future available. You gave five answers. The system needed fewer. Your future was already claimed.
The Injection traces belief to its source. It asks what you believe about six topics—breakfast, diamonds, climate, diet, crime, corporations—and then shows you where those beliefs came from. Not your reasoning. The infrastructure that preceded it: the memos, the funding, the campaigns, the repetition.
Every supply chain in this piece is documented. Primary sources where they exist. Exposed industry memos. Congressional testimony. Academic investigations published decades after the fact. The piece doesn't tell you that you're wrong. It shows you the pipes.
You believe things. Some of them you reasoned your way to. Some of them were installed. The most sophisticated minds are often the most vulnerable—complexity provides camouflage. How many of your beliefs arrived this way? Would you know if they had?
This piece was also designed to shape what you believe. It selected which supply chains to show you. It framed them in particular ways. It has its own infrastructure. Did it work?
The Feed examines how algorithmic systems shape what we pay attention to, and how attention shapes what we become. The piece explores the mechanisms by which platforms capture, direct, and monetize attention—turning consciousness into a resource to be extracted and optimized.
Attention is not neutral. What we attend to shapes what we become. Algorithmic systems know this. They are designed to capture attention, to direct it, to monetize it. The feed is not a window onto the world. It is a machine for extracting value from consciousness.
The piece makes visible the mechanisms by which attention is captured and directed: the algorithms, the metrics, the optimization loops. It shows how attention becomes a resource, how consciousness becomes a commodity.
Together, these three pieces form a portrait: prediction colonizes the future, injection installs the present, and the feed captures attention. The installation is the collection itself—three pieces, three domains, one system.
Each piece is accessible at its own subdomain. You can experience them individually, or as a collection. The installation is the collection itself: three pieces, three domains, one system. The system is the art.
The goal is not to tell you that you're wrong, or that you're being manipulated. The goal is to make the pipes visible. To show the infrastructure that precedes choice, the machinery that makes some futures available and others impossible.
We live inside systems that predict us, install beliefs in us, and direct our attention. These systems don't just observe us—they construct us. The Prior makes this construction visible.