Director’s Commentary

“The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

— Antonio Gramsci

As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly intertwined with our cultural landscape, many artists – myself included – find ourselves suspended between awe and anxiety. The realisation that humanity has always been intertwined with technology reveals a strange paradox: an unoriginal sin perhaps, where this tension is not new after all. Machines are born of human hands, yet they quickly become vessels for projection, fear, and myth.

Today, as we raise our heads and glimpse at the monsters disguised among men – of Big Tech and capital’s relentless expansion – it has become harder to ignore how the narrative of inevitable technological progress has begun to erode the very things that define humanity: creative agency and critical thought.

In an interregnum of men and monsters, can any form of peace emerge from this in-between realm?

This editorial imagines one possible answer. Through silver hardware adorning the body and styling that exists somewhere between the timeless and the liminal, the human body is recentered. Set against a speculative landscape where flesh, nature, and machine coexist, these images reflect a negotiation between invasion and harmony, where the distortions that ripple through – some intrusive, some gentle – mirror the uneasy coexistence between humanity and its own creations. Yet, beneath the absurdity lies a simple proposition: a future that does not belong to algorithms or the systems that profit from them, but to persistent human belief, imagination, and creation.

Deviance, here, is not an act of rebellion for its own sake, but a refusal to surrender the human spirit to systems that seek to puppeteer it. To remain deviant is to remain indomitably human – to continue believing, creating, and imagining futures that cannot be reduced to code.