Gallery Entry
Recursive Sisyphus: Pedaling Against the Algorithm
By Danbi Sung · KR
Recursive Sisyphus (2026) started with a question about seamlessness: whose time and consciousness platform efficiency actually runs on? Traveling between Vienna and Seoul over five years, the most striking change was delivery. In Vienna, I still walk to the bakery. In Seoul, I had stopped entirely. It felt like living in different timelines. The friction had not disappeared. It had moved onto workers whose labor is fragmented into seconds, allocated by an algorithm they cannot see or question. The tactics workers develop to survive—decoding the algorithm, timing their location, anticipating its logic—are absorbed back into the system as data, recalibrated into tighter constraints. Consciousness does not liberate. It accelerates control. The installation takes the platform's own visual language: its rewards, its notifications, its tone. And turns it against itself. The participant pedals a physical bicycle connected to a delivery app. Each delivery completed, the next demand arrives shorter. As participants adapted, their speed fed back into the system, making the next task harder. Through comparative research across Vienna, Seoul, and Beijing, I began to notice how everyday life keeps pace with computational systems in each city. I called this gap the Urban-Data Sync Lag: the gap between lived reality and the systems that increasingly anticipate, organize and synchronize it. By the end, the participant is pedaling to meet a deadline the system has already decided they cannot meet, ultimately locked out by a chatbot interface mimicking platform "care". Furthermore the participant's screen is simultaneously projected to the surrounding audience, transforming them into a performer and the audience into witnesses, to labor the interface was designed to conceal.
- Category
- CONCEPTS MIXED MEDIA
- Approved
- 5 October 2026
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