WEATHER CONDITIONS

SCULPTURE, SOFTWARE, DATA
 
In the 1970s, broadcast media restructured the domestic space. Fifty years later, social media is restructuring democracies and bodies. And with this, a new category of the user as a political entity has emerged. The user isn't just a citizen who votes or a consumer who buys. The user is shaped by affective media streams—their attention, emotional responses, and behavioral patterns become the raw material that feeds back into the system. The user generates data that trains the next iteration of media. The user isn't just surveilled or manipulated; the user is where the material conditions of contemporary politics are enacted.

Recon is a media monitoring and analysis tool that treats information streams like audio signals—applying sound synthesis and signal processing techniques to political and social media data. It functions as a "forensic console" for deconstructing how narratives are manufactured and circulated. Recon positions itself as active political practice, not critique.

All data has flat ontological importance. We need simple tools—held by us, not subject to subscription or service. Tools that let the user become an operator: the sickle and hammer of the technological age. The tool should give its operator direct access to this mediatic infrastructure—not to observe it from a distance, but to operate on it.