Who Says What Is Real? is an ongoing investigation into the systems through which things become recognised as real, valuable, acceptable, or worth preserving.

Moving between digital environments, 3D-printed structures, machine residue, archival material and computational systems, the work considers the boundary between the digital and the physical not as a division, but as a continuous exchange. Digital forms acquire weight, seams, failures and material histories. Physical objects return to the logic of data, classification and reproduction.

At the centre of the work is an understanding of emotion as an architecture: something constructed through memory, sensation, repetition, reaction and accumulated experience. The modular structure of the installation follows this logic. Forms grow, repeat, harden, interrupt and transform. Cattails behave like intrusive thoughts; crystalline structures hold memories that have hardened into form; fungi digest what has been left behind.

The fabrication process produces another material: residue.

Purges, strings, supports and failed prints are collected rather than discarded. What the machine identifies as waste becomes evidence of the system operating. Once preserved, named and displayed, its status begins to shift.

The computational work performs a parallel act. An emotion enters the system. The system observes, measures and attempts to classify it. Some emotions become legible. Others return an error:

EMOTION NOT ACCEPTABLE.

Yet something does not cease to exist because a system cannot recognise it.

Across the installation, the machine classifies emotion; the artist classifies the machine’s waste; institutions classify objects; archives classify what deserves to remain.

Different architectures.

A strangely familiar operation.

Who Says What Is Real? asks not whether the digital is real, whether machine-made material is authentic, or whether a feeling can be proven.

It asks:

WHO BUILT THE SYSTEM

THAT REQUIRES US

TO PROVE THAT IT IS?