In Conversation: k0j0 on Phantasmagoric Stories and Interfaces
- Amy Jiang
- 6 minutes ago
- 6 min read
In the feedback loops of machine learning, certain bodies, cultures, and ways of knowing are made visible, distorted, or erased. Like ghosts—excluded yet ever-present—they haunt the machine. They slip through algorithmic blind spots, bend systems’ logic, and disrupt with glitches and ruptures that unsettle computational control. But ghosts don’t just haunt—they rewire. They assert presence, reframe meaning, and speak in forms the system was never trained to understand. Through cracks in the loop, they reemerge as designers of new imaginaries for themselves and for the communities the system failed to see. Ghosts in the Feedback Loop is a virtual exhibition that invites artists to work inside those cracks—to treat algorithmic systems not as endpoints of automation but as haunted infrastructures alive with memory, loss, and rebellion. This interview is part of TechnoMirage, UAAD’s latest curatorial & publishing project exploring the intersections of artificial intelligence, speculative design, and collective imagination. Emerging from a multi-format event series—including a virtual exhibition, an online panel co-hosted with Parsons, and an IRL gathering of workshops, talks, and performances—the publication extends these dialogues into an archival form.
About the Artists
We tell phantasmagoric stories about unconscious friction.
k0j0 (Koi Ren and Joey Verbeke) is a New Media Art duo creating subversive and frictional “intrafaces”—artifacts that reveal the power, politics, and posthuman subjectivities embedded within systemic interactions. Their research-based practice draws from their backgrounds in human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, media studies, and speculative design.
Through the de-familiarization of seductive seamlessness and tacit expectations, k0j0 provokes moments of epistemological rupture, inviting viewers into intimate proximity with the unfamiliar and the emergent dynamics shaping our futures.
Their work has been shown at venues and events such as Ars Electronica, ACM SIGGRAPH, TEDAI, MUTEK, Gray Area, Heckscher Museum, Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Diego Rivera Gallery, Angels Gate Cultural Center, Sundance Film Festival, and Denver International Airport.
Q: Could you tell us a bit about your background, and how your work connects to the theme “Ghosts in the Feedback Loop”?
We are k0j0 (Koi Ren & Joey Verbeke), a research-based new media art duo with backgrounds in human-computer interaction, innovation and design, and media theory. One core intention of forming this duo was to defamiliarize the tacit expectation of seductive seamlessness that is so pervasive within contemporary technology design philosophy. We create subversive and frictional artifacts that present as ubiquitous and empathetic but instead invite viewers into intimate proximity with unfamiliar non-binary alternatives, rejecting both the utopic and dystopic myths of technology.
The continuity of our research and practice has led us to the Intraface: the interface within the interface that reveals the power, politics, and post-human subjectivities embedded within systemic interactions.
Several threads within our work are deeply intertwined with the theme of Ghosts in the Feedback Loop, but we would like to specifically touch on Phantasmagoria. The term originated from a form of horror theater popular around the turn of the 19th century, in which magic lanterns projected ghosts, skeletons, and demons within a dark, smoky room. Eventually, philosophers such as Walter Benjamin and Karl Marx adopted this term to explain how images, technologies, and narratives can create a world in which representation supersedes the represented.
Emerging technology is full of awe, even more so within the mainstream new media art scene, mainly through beautiful high-resolution visualizations. We see the “ghosts” as these phantasmagoric representations—the awe and frill of grandeur. Our practice aims to subvert this form through artifacts that intentionally create and expose a crack during an interactive experience, allowing the Intraface to be revealed.
Q: How do you perceive AI—as a tool, a collaborator, a medium, a subject, or something else? And how does that shape your artistic process?
For us, AI is a volatile presence: subject, tool, collaborator, medium, and infrastructure all at once. As McLuhan reminds us, the medium is the message. Its mere presence rewrites the terms of attention, agency, and relation. The prevailing fear of AI “replacement” is a capitalist branding myth that sells anxiety to normalize extraction and scale.
We engage AI as cognitive material, staging seamless, empathetic forms only to let a subtle snag reveal the Intraface, where power, politics, and subjectivity surface. That rupture is everything: an invitation for viewers to sense how systems shape us and to imagine how we might answer back, together, inside the loop.
Q: What futures does your featured work gesture toward or warn against? Who do you imagine as your audience, and how do you hope they are impacted?
We want to provoke critical curiosity within viewers, enabling them to question rather than blindly incorporate any predefined answers.
With the dominance of fear-based narratives surrounding AI, we are seeing a renaissance of humanism—for example, initiatives like “Tech for Good.”
Who defines what is good?
Who is creating, and who is considered, in the “basic human rights” that everyone should receive?
We aim to weave philosophical underpinnings of posthuman subjectivity into our work. Our projects do not aim to propose any form of realistic futures; instead, we create ambiguously absurd alternatives. For example, Gradi Vox highlights a device that is both augmentative and diminutive, parasitic and symbiotic, utopic and dystopic. Without closure, the viewer must consider for themselves.
Q: Are there particular communities, histories, or environments your work remains in conversation with? How do those relationships evolve over time?
We come from HCI, design, and innovation, and we respond to that industry. Danae Tapia’s “Incompetent Design Against Digital Colonialism” resonates—for example, the absurd use of Mark Zuckerberg’s image on a poorly designed billboard for South American private schools, where many viewers do not recognize him. Incompleteness here works as a small, self-deprecating resistance to digital colonialism.
Design operates as phantasmagoria in Marx’s sense, where fetish objects hold power. Ideology is wrapped inside interfaces and systems. Our first collaboration examined friction and glitch as resistance, as epistemic rupture. From there, we looked at unconscious friction—the inertia of habit embedded in design—to reveal hidden politics.
Now we focus on intimate moments where human and machine meet and tension forms. In the Gradi Vox video, the wearable speaks only when the person speaks.
Q: What do you see as the most urgent threats or uncertainties we may face in the coming decade with the rise of AI?
Koi: The urgent threat is techno-monoculture and information flattening, linked to labor, manipulation, and control. In China, I watched food delivery drivers consume short AI-generated TikTok videos at red lights while an app guided their routes. This creates a loop in which labor and attention are both optimized and extracted on fully data-driven platforms. Where can the human be in this system?
Another moment stays with me. I lost my voice before an artist talk and used an AI trained on my speech to present. The AI spoke in my voice but without my Chinese accent, and it used perfect grammar and complex words. I felt relief at sounding correct and at not having to memorize every sentence, which meant I could avoid mistakes, discrimination, misunderstanding, and misogyny. At the same time, I felt I had lost my identity and courage. I gave up the accent, the broken English, and the hours of practice, and I also risked giving up the pursuit of equality and justice that my voice carries.
Joey: Uncertainty is not an error state. It is a generative condition. Much of the current AI project treats uncertainty as a bug to fix, and many cultural systems offer relief by supplying easy answers that remove the work of thinking. Life tends toward entropy, and meaning lives in our capacity to adapt inside it. Post-humanist nomadic identities that refuse fixed selfhood point to healthier ways of living with AI.
The problem is that our infrastructures reward compression. When culture is vectorized into a small model that fits on a phone, flattening is not only aesthetic—it is political. Scale is never neutral. The push to solve for everybody with one model centralizes power and erases context. The task ahead is to build plural, situated systems and to cultivate uncertainty literacy so that not-knowing can remain a space for attention, empathy, and change.
Q: Are there any theories, books, or artists you’d like to recommend in your current areas of interest?
Phantasmagoria: Representation overtakes the represented, via Walter Benjamin and Karl Marx.
Glitch and media theory: Failure and resolution as critique, via Rosa Menkman and Hito Steyerl.
Friction and interfaces: Interfaces as political and aesthetic machines, via Alexander Galloway.
Posthumanism: Distributed subjectivity and nomadic identities, via Rosi Braidotti.
Lead Editor: Amy Xiaofan Jiang
Assistant Editor: Paridhi Garg
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