STILBWORKS

There is no online and offline. At the intersection of digital and physical worlds, there are powerplants and datacenters, plastic waste and acid rain. The effects are inescapable. "stilb.works" is my multimedia project exploring this precarious intersection. Within this space, I carve out my personal paranoid bubble of superflat anime escapism. What does Stilb do? They make an effort to mash my 2000s nostalgia and optimism into my anger with tech, but in these efforts, I now feel I've been disconnected from any particular location and have, thus, been spaghettified: sent through the internet cables and stretched out at the speed of light. It's a real mess.

I turn the irrational social anxieties of online spaces into large-scale installations. Through this environment, I interrogate the role of escapism and daydreams in my life. Sometimes, these works might feel cute. Sometimes, they might feel like the anxious sound of nails on a chalkboard. Oftentimes, they are both. My work, combined, places the viewer into an ambient space that deliberately blurs the physical and digital. I suggest there is no distinction. I aim for the cutting edge of tech to date the work to our current pop culture, to reflect and demolish a culture of tech-fetishism. I fill capsules with the distorted forms of my childhood Happy Meal toys. Some capsules are intact; others are warped by heat or spill 3D printing failures – "spaghetti." These plastic materials are the center, creating a "digital grotesque" that clashes the manufactured innocence of toys with a sense of toxicity and decay.

I make mascots for Stilb, meticulously creating figures of slice-of-life characters who are then left wandering molten plastic landscapes. One of them is "Raincoat," a mascot character who stands frozen mid-step as if tending to plastic capsules or carrying their melted counterparts. In "Capsule Toy Rain Cloud," this unstable environment is further enclosed by a 50-minute looping ambient soundscape emanating from speakers embedded within larger capsule forms, suggesting the objects might be secretly communicating amongst themselves. I aim to evoke the unease of digital surveillance systems built into seemingly benign 'smart' objects. I aim to make the experience immersive yet fractured, again to reflect my personal paranoid bubble. I also aim to situate myself critically within structures of technology and culture. I push back against pervasive tech optimism and fetishism, questioning the utopian promises of Silicon Valley narratives and exposing the limitations and biases embedded within systems like AI.

Stylistically and conceptually, my project engages with Takashi Murakami's "Superflat" theory, which collapses distinctions between high art and popular culture. However, where Superflat often embraces the aesthetics of consumerism, this work attempts a form of critical détournement. Through layers of translation (and mistranslation), I melt the superflat into spaghetti or perhaps into a Mobius strip. I aim to use the language of mass-produced pop culture and digital processes against itself. Rather than merely seeking escape, my work engages directly with escapist media, particularly tropes from Japanese anime and manga like iyashikei (healing style) and isekai (another world). The familiar character archetypes and nostalgic objects are repurposed not merely for comfort but to critique the socio-economic anxieties they try to soothe. Despite critiquing the consumer culture that produces so much waste, I work in plastics and resins, trying to embrace this contradiction. I aim to highlight the materiality behind digital experiences and focus on processes of failure, decay, and transformation as a counter-aesthetic to modern technology's seamless, sanitized, and often ahistorical presentation. Ultimately, "stilb.works" seeks to navigate the complex territory between critique and complicity, using art to question, subvert, and hopefully reclaim agency within the systems that shape our contemporary culture.