SYSTEM ERROR_

Each time the news leaves me speechless—a disturbingly frequent occurrence lately—I think of Rhinoceros (1959) by Eugène Ionesco. The play portrays the spread of absurdity through social contagion: as people submit to simplified, authoritarian, and dehumanizing thinking, brutality becomes normalized and reason itself seems irrational. To resist becoming a rhinoceros is to defend complexity, sensitivity, and human connection against the forces that make violence appear ordinary. Today, that struggle also includes confronting technopolitical systems of automated influence that distort public perception. SYSTEM ERROR_ brings together traditional media, photography, video, and digital technologies to examine the values, contradictions, and collective behaviors of global culture. Set in a near future, the work imagines a world where the tragicomic collapse envisioned by Ionesco has deepened the tensions of the present. Hybrid beings—part biological, part technological—move between the fragility of physical life and the apparent permanence of digital images. Emerging from algorithmic desensitization, they reflect a condition in which brutality is normalized, organic life is replaced by artificial simulation, and reality itself becomes unstable. What unfolds is an archaeological fable: a sentient machine looks back at this era, trying to understand the path to extinction.