Exhibition: 9 October 2026 – 2 January 2027
gnration
praça Conde de Agrolongo 123
4700-312 Braga, Portugal
Digital Dark Matter explores the concept of digital dark matter, speculating on what it might be comprised of and what it might tell us about the nonvisual perforations in computational media. Discussing aspects of digital culture that may shape our contemporary reality in meaningful ways, it looks at the operationalization (Farocki 1969/2026) of vision that has played out in recent advances in generative artificial intelligence. The project invites audiences to reflect on the intangible forces that may influence advanced technologies and what implications this may have for visual culture.
There are gaps within the complex infrastructure of computational systems where the human eye has little access, but that may be filled with latent visuality. Digital dark matter is hypothesized as inert data within a corpus of digital media. Like the same concept in astrophysics, it may not be visible, but its existence may be implied by absence.
Webpages with broken links, unpopular videos on YouTube, the innumerable images that comprise machine learning datasets — these opaque spaces are visual to some extent but they are mostly inaccessible to humans, nonvisual — or invisual (Parikka 2023). Such content exists as a kind of inert matter that may affect the overall structure of amassed digital culture that exists in the world yet it may never have been seen by human eyes. More intriguing still, digital dark matter may have further parallels to the impact of dark matter on the universe, with a tendency to expand in comparison to “illuminated matter” (Di Leonardo and Kaplan 2023), or digital material that is known to researchers.
The project is supported by DGArtes, the Directorate-General for the Arts is the body of the Portuguese Republic (government area of Culture, Youth and Sport).
References
Farocki, Harun. “To Scientize Agitation and Politicize Science.” Translated by Ted Fendt. E-Flux, no. 162 (2026 1969).
di Lenardo, Isabella, and Frédéric Kaplan. “Ce que les machines ont vu et que nous ne savons pas encore.” Sociétés & Représentations 55, no. 1 (2023): 249–67. https://doi.org/10.3917/sr.055.0249.
Parikka, Jussi. Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023.