Image Against Oppression
"Audio Visual Live "
Image Against Oppression is an online audiovisual project performed with TouchDesigner and a MIDI controller. Working with a locally stored corpus of internet-circulated “sensitive” imagery—animal attacks, game violence, and media riots—the project stages adversarial degradation as a VJ interface: a live, performable reduction of recognizability that keeps images at a threshold of near-recognition. Rather than treating content moderation as external to images, the work understands “sensitivity” as an interface form—a negotiated boundary shaped by platform policy, imagined collective judgment, and embodied tolerance.​
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By modulating blur, thresholding, temporal stutter, displacement, and blackout rhythms in real time, the performance interrupts the feed’s seamless legibility and exposes the operational layer through which platforms distribute attention and affect. The project aims to avoid re-circulating graphic evidence while preserving the pressure of encounter, inviting viewers to reflect on digital identity, collective behavior, and emotional manipulation under algorithmic governance.
The project articulates this method as interface consciousness: a critical awareness of how seeing is conditioned by the screen’s warnings, loops, and thresholds.
Image Against Oppression proposes adversarial degradation as a VJ interface for critical encounter with sensitive network images. By reframing “sensitivity” as an interface form, the project shifts attention from content alone to the operational conditions that shape perception: warnings, thresholds, repetition, and algorithmic similarity. Within a livestreamed panorama, degradation interrupts seamless consumption and produces interface consciousness—an awareness of how seeing becomes targeting, and how the screen’s operational logic governs affect.
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Rather than presenting “clear” images as evidence, the work insists on the friction of encountering—where uncertainty is not a deficit, but an ethical and aesthetic strategy. In that sense, degradation is not simply a loss of information, but a refusal of the interface’s demand that everything become legible, searchable, and shareable.
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