Conception

Image Anarchy is an immersive thesis exhibition exploring the poetic potential of design in an era where images are relentlessly consumed, authored, and distributed. This project challenges visual norms by blending digital, augmented, and physical experiences, encouraging users to question their role in the infinite cycle of visual consumption.

Opportunity: The Visual Overload Crisis

The digital age has made images more accessible than ever, but at what cost? The poetic nature of visual communication has been diluted, replaced by instant gratification and algorithm-driven sameness. In a world where every image is a potential ad, a meme, or a hyper-curated projection of self, authenticity is at stake.

Experience Design: Challenging the Three Image States

Through Image Anarchy, I sought to dissect and disrupt the mindless consumption of images by examining their three primary states:

1️⃣ The Consumed Image – How images are devoured without a second thought.
2️⃣ The Authored Image – The self-image we construct and curate.
3️⃣ The Distributed Image – The viral nature of visual content and its impact on perception.

1. The Consumed Image: Tinder Cookies & Edible Eye-Candy

Images today exist as instant gratification, much like junk food—quickly consumed, discarded, and replaced. The exhibition made this tangible with Tinder Cookies—edible biscuits imprinted with random dating app profiles, symbolizing the fleeting, transactional nature of visual culture.

🔹 Key Interaction: Visitors could physically consume an image—a metaphor for the mindless swiping culture that reduces people to aesthetic bites.

2. The Authored Image: Augmented Reality & The Digital Mirror

Today, we are all authors of our own digital personas, endlessly curating images to project idealized versions of self. This installation used Snapchat’s AR technology to create an interactive experience—a large-scale projection filter that transformed the participant’s face into a collage of their own doomscrolling habits.

🔹 Key Interaction: By standing in front of the projection, users saw themselves morphed by the very images they consume daily, blurring the line between authorship and influence.

3. The Distributed Image: Internet Bubbles & Meme-Spheres

The internet fosters echo chambers, where information circulates within belief bubbles but rarely expands beyond them. This installation translated the digital meme-sphere into a physical experience—a 5ft by 5ft inflatable bubble, covered in endlessly looping doomscroll content curated in real time.

🔹 Key Interaction: Visitors physically stepped into the bubble, symbolizing how we live within self-curated digital realities, isolated from broader perspectives.

Final Thoughts: Breaking the Cycle

Image Anarchy aimed to interrupt the passive consumption of visual culture, forcing users to confront their relationship with images.

🔹 Key Learnings:

• Interactivity drives awareness—giving users a physical experience of digital behaviors led to deeper reflection.

• Merging digital and tangible media is a powerful tool to challenge perception.

• Augmented reality and immersive spaces provide new avenues for storytelling in experiential design.

The exhibition received recognition for Outstanding Experiential Design at the AIGA Jacksonville Portfolio Reviews, proving that the intersection of technology, art, and interaction can create meaningful, thought-provoking experiences.

This project was a statement against the hyperreproduction of visual culture, and a testament to design’s ability to reclaim meaning in a world oversaturated with images.