Desert of the Unreal
Martyna Marciniak
Betonhalle
Betonhalle
Betonhalle
Betonhalle
Betonhalle
The work is produced as part of transmediale’s Vilém Flusser Residency for Artistic Research 2026 in cooperation with University of the Arts Berlin (UdK) and will premiere at Transgressive Memory Festival.
The departure point for this project is a 2023 Reddit post depicting AI-generated rescue scenes from the 2001 Cascadia event: a disaster that never happened, yet evoked an uncanny sense of collective misremembering. Representational categories structure how generative AI systems encode, retrieve, and reproduce the world. Yet these categories are too rigid to accommodate contextual change.
Instead, they recursively reorganise reality according to shifting classifications, rewriting the past and narrowing the range of imaginable futures. As computational memory reaches its limits, chronology and causality begin to collapse, flattening historical distinction into searchable similarity.
In response to this technological condition and the Cascadia anomaly, Desert of the Unreal proposes that visual fakes and hoaxes are not primarily a function of mimicry, but of infrastructure. An image no longer needs to convincingly resemble material reality if it circulates through the same systems of categorisation, retrieval, and memory that capture and authenticate reality itself.
To examine the fragility of the past and the denial of the future, the work turns to the digital mechanics of the early 2000s. The video piece physically restages selected Cascadia rescue elements alongside the digital Y2K icons such as Microsoft's Clippy and Claire the Bear, all situated within the architecture, logic, and visual language of the first editions of The Sims (2000-2001).
The video is paired with a sculpture that materialises the aesthetic and physical sources behind the fabricated Cascadia images: the objects, textures, and visual references that appear to have fed their generation. Together, the works expose how computational systems no longer merely represent history, but participate in its continual reconstruction.
Desert of the Unreal is presented as part of the cooperation between transmediale and Transgressive Memory Festival.