Peter Polack, PhD (b. 1993, USA) is a Berlin-based artist and researcher whose work addresses political experience under systems of technological control. His projects present as collections of political artifacts, speculative software, and intimate records: networked narratives that sprawl beyond the exhibition space, where technological utopias confront the nuances of social and political life. As a crip hacker and abolitionist, his analysis of technology and power uses health and the human body as a lens to reckon with systems that produce political and physical vulnerability.
God Mode, 2025
Custom game engine, monologue, selfie ring-light, 3d prints
Aimless wandering in a nostalgic videogame environment turns out to have a dark shadow: ambivalent play mirrors the violence of computational control.
Play here
Garden of Cartesian Desire, 2025
Custom game engine, original soundtrack
A labyrinthian garden promises to free users from their physical ails. Their movements echo the thoughts of philosophers who struggled with illness and disability.
Play the game here
Eliza???, 2025
Unreal Engine, monologue, illustrations, 3d prints
An AI girlfriend chatbot ghosted its user. As he turns to the arcane rituals of tulpamancy and pickup artistry, the programmer reveals himself as programmed.
Computational Parable, 2025
Unreal Engine, Blender, monologue, gas tank, 3d prints, inkjet on acrylic
A data-driven sociologist reflects on his desire to find the root of social unrest, sculpting social relationships on his tabletop canvas. His work reveals a life philosophy of Simulationism, where computational modeling is the truth of the social world.
Emotional Contagion, 2024
Raspberry Pi WiFi network, monologue, ink on paper
A network ensares its visitors in a twisted web of lore and sound. As they connect with the fragments and each other's devices, they reveal themselves as nodes in a network of social contagion, caught in the schemes of the relationship moderation company Hysterica Analytica.
Plataforma, 2024
Unreal Engine, monologue, original soundtrack
A disembodied visitor reflects on the speculative architecture that they see before them. Its conspicuous absence of time and place manifest as a sense of anxiety about purpose and origin.
Egrecorp, 2022
Custom game engine
A utopian experiment in online governance is confronted with a swarm of political tensions and algorithmic illusions, upsetting its ambition to think political organization exclusively in terms of code. Governance systems become a labyrinth of puzzles and horrors.
Play the game here
Diagram, 2021
Custom simulations, single-channel video
Crime analysis software proves to use the same logic as videogames, where algorithms create synthetic narratives to lend a coherent image of truth.
Doomsday Cartography, 2021
Custom game engine, voice actors, field recordings
The worst nightmares of military strategists – from their “Counter-Zombie Dominance” plan to their cinematic descriptions of a future of crime and need in “Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity” – come to life in the Feral City.