In the context of rising far-right movements across Western Europe, a group of students chose to address the mechanisms of disinformation through a Bauhaus-inspired artistic exhibition. Their objective was to explore how media, and in particular social media, contributes to the spread of false information and the radicalization of public opinion. To accomplish this, the students mobilized three key concepts drawn from the theories of Norbert Wiener: cybernetics, feedback, and entropy. The first concept allowed them to examine how communication systems break down in the absence of control and transparency. The second highlighted how social media algorithms amplify provocative or misleading content through engagement loops, likes, shares and comments acting as feedback signals that push harmful content further into public view. The third, entropy, served to illustrate the growing disorder produced by information overload, a saturation that weakens critical thinking and makes individuals more receptive to simplified or radical narratives.
Finally, visitors encountered the "Partially Erased Billboard," a series of display panels from which key words had been deliberately removed. The missing words created gaps in the message, inviting visitors to complete the information themselves, and in doing so, to reveal their own biases and assumptions. This installation illustrated the fragility of information and the ease with which it can be manipulated when essential elements are withheld. Visitors were left free to explore the space at their own pace and in their own order, though guidance was available when needed. As they moved from one experience to the next, many showed visible signs of disorientation, nervous laughter, frowns, sideways smiles, reactions that testified to the unsettling effect of the exhibition's cumulative logic. In the end, the exhibition proved to be a success in terms of visitor engagement. Many attendees reported being genuinely unsettled by the experience, leaving with a heightened awareness of how easily information can be manipulated. The students conveyed through this project the idea that the boundary between truth and falsehood is not always easy to identify, and that this difficulty is not accidental. It is, in many ways, the intended effect of disinformation itself.
|
The exhibition itself was designed as an immersive, 360-degree experience. Visitors moved through a series of installations, each conceived as a form of "noise" in the sense used by Shannon and Weaver, disrupting the transmission of clear and reliable information. The different activities were arranged in an isolated room, set apart from the other exhibitions, so as to create a self-contained atmosphere of confusion and immersion. The first of these, "Black Box of Images," presented a looping sequence of far-right politicians spreading false information across media outlets, edited in the style of television channel zapping, the clips gradually degraded in image and sound quality until the sequence ended with a complete cut to black, marking the collapse of a system saturated beyond recovery. Alongside this, a sculptural installation of suspended, criss-crossing threads titled "Disconnected Dialogue Lines" represented communication flows that no longer follow any coherent logic, illustrating Wiener's concept of negative feedback failure and the broken connections between senders and receivers. A third activity, "Black Box of Sounds," placed the visitor at the center of an audio chaos where political speeches, conspiracy theories and false information were broadcast on loop, initially clear and distinct before gradually overlapping, distorting and accelerating until nearly inaudible, with a ticking clock introduced progressively to amplify the sensation of disorder and urgency. .Completing this sensory landscape, a "Wall of Contradictory Images" brought together AI-generated visuals of varying degrees of realism, some credible, others openly exaggerated, saturating the space with doubt and illustrating how feedback loops in communication can amplify fundamentally false information to the point where reality and fiction become indistinguishable.
|
