Data_Colonialist (©) simulates environments through 3D rendering and spatial manipulation. Artworks aren’t bound by physical limits—they are recontextualized, repositioned in relation to one another, generating new relationships, meanings, and tensions between them. Departing from static illumination, the environment simulates the physics of sunlight, while even the earth beneath the painting can shift—destabilizing the conventions of art historical display.
This act of digital manipulation directly parallels the effortless way digital artifacts are reproduced, downloaded, copied, and circulated—fluid, frictionless, and detached from origin—exposing the insidious nature of a new form of colonization: the slow encroachment of algorithmic taste.
Curation, in this context, becomes a way of drawing attention to the systems we rarely notice—but always inhabit. Systems that feed on mimetic desire, quietly teaching us what to want by showing us what others already do.