This exhibition explores how humans, entangled in the hyperfold* era, may find themselves “trapped” in a modern-day candy house of their own making. It poses a critical question: can we still purify and exorcise this haunted house of the digital age, or have we become the new witches lying in wait for lost prey?
Featuring works by Anca Bârjovanu, Ella Wang Olsson, Guy Bar-Sinai, Ioana Georgescu, Paul Barsch, Shai Datauker, Sophia Schullan, Tilman Hornig, and Xiaoyao Ma, through the interplay of design, technology, and art, Exorcise the Candy House examines the seductive allure and hidden dangers of the hyperfold. It invites viewers to reconsider the agency of the entities we create and inhabit, questioning whether redemption is possible — or even necessary — within a world of interconnected consciousness.
At its core, the exhibition disrupts conventional design paradigms, proposing that designed entities are not merely functional tools but contemplative instruments — portals for provoking progressive social design and reimagining digital spaces. It challenges us to confront the moral void of the hyperfold while envisioning a more compassionate path toward collective redemption. Rejecting purely functionalist perspectives, the show posits design as an act of exorcism.
It asks: What if digital spaces, rather than mirroring hierarchies, became gardens of radical care? Could treating AI with dignity catalyze liberation for historically marginalized human voices? Can surveillance infrastructures pivot from a mechanism of control to architectures of admiration? To exorcise is not to destroy, but to reclaim — to reimagine the candy house as a commune.
Will we remain witches, feasting on the lost? Become mere snacks, feeding a greedy capitalist system? Or will we transform into sisters (like the sister who saved her brother in the fairytale) — guardians of a newborn consciousness that honors all beings, human, non-human, machine, and data, as kin?
*Hyperfold: A state in which humans, IoT, AI, humanoids, minerals, and other agents — alongside data — are super-covalently folded into a collective being. This conscious entity operates with its own will, functioning within compressed and accelerated time. (Concept by Wumen.)
When writing this text, Wumen was helped by Grammar, Chat GPT, and Deep Seek; she is grateful but also annoyed at the same time.
design & development by Webiii