Abstract

This project examines how contemporary platform systems transform the production, circulation, and valorisation of identity. It argues that digital culture has moved beyond representational models toward computational forms of mediation, in which identities, visibility, and participation are continuously generated, classified, and modulated through algorithmic processes. In this context, the self is no longer simply expressed but actively produced as data—shaped by infrastructures that optimise visibility, engagement, prediction, and value extraction.

The project introduces the concept of augmented capitalism to describe this emerging phase, in which platform systems and artificial intelligence operationalise and automate the commodification of identity. Under augmented capitalism, the self functions simultaneously as subject, commodity, and productive infrastructure. The research argues that contemporary digital systems increasingly valorise not only labour, attention, and data, but the self-image itself, transforming identity into a recursively productive computational asset.

The research is both theoretical and practice-based. Alongside conceptual analysis, it develops the Immanent Critique Engine (ICE), a generative AI framework that translates theoretical principles into a working computational model. Through processes of classification, image generation, interpretation, and feedback, the system makes its own operations visible. Rather than critiquing platform systems from the outside, the project adopts an immanent methodology, engaging computational systems through their own operational logic.

Drawing upon Mark Fisher's concepts of the weird and the eerie, the project investigates how computational mediation produces conditions of ontological instability in which agency, identity, and reality become increasingly fragmented, distributed, and opaque. These conditions are explored through four interconnected dimensions: identity, weirdness, eeriness, and valorisation.
Through this approach, the work explores how critique can emerge from within computation itself—through disruption, distributed agency, and the exposure of system behaviour. The outputs are not simply artworks, but artefacts of system activity that reveal how identity is continuously classified, processed, and reconfigured within computational infrastructures.

By positioning artificial intelligence as both subject and method, Curating the Self contributes a new framework for understanding identity under contemporary capitalism and proposes a practice-based model of operational critique. It suggests that the critical challenge is no longer simply how systems of power are represented, but how critique might meaningfully operate within and against their computational infrastructures.