the intersection (Superflux)

The Intersection is a short film made by Superflux and commissioned by Omidyar Network in 2020–21. It follows four protagonists whose lives have been shaped by the attention economy: misinformation, surveillance capitalism, and the slow collapse of trust in information itself. The film builds from a dystopian present towards a possible hopeful future. Writing this in 2026, with generative AI now woven into most of our information environment, the dystopian parts feel less like speculation and more like recent history. My main contribution was in imagining and building artefacts from that possible future.

My contributions can be seen at the end of the film, where the world opens out into something different. Working closely with Ed Lewis, we developed the future concurrently through discussion, design, and making. A series of physical artefacts and the ideas about what kind of world they came from emerged from this process. Making prototypes from this future allowed us to imagine the activities of people in it. The logic of this alternative way of existing without information capitalism came through the materials as much as through discussion. The future we imagined was shaped by what we at Superflux were beginning to call the Craftocene: 'Resurgent Tools Generated from the Waste of the Anthropocene.' In a world where mass production has wound down, people build what they need from what's available; technology is reappropriated, repaired, recombined. There's a lot of electronic scrap in this future, and still some knowledge about how to use it.

Specifically, I built a series of mesh network sensors from that logic: a glass jar housing a sensor and antenna, a plastic bottle with circuitry designed to echo the shape of a tree, other sensors made from reused electronics. The question we were asking was: if the attention economy is the problem, what does a different relationship with technology look like? We landed on sensing rather than capturing. In this future, one of the main purposes of technology is to sense the environment and pass that information on: distributed mesh networks that monitor the earth rather than monitor people. Knowledge is stored locally and shared peer-to-peer, part oral, part digital. Journalism, in this world, has been reimagined around that infrastructure.

For me, this project was an early working-out of ideas I'd been circling. I'd been thinking about how we engage with materials, not as products to consume but as things to work with, build from, make something with (see project Wastemakers). I was also beginning to understand data through a similar lens. The literature on surveillance capitalism was making visible for me how data extraction from living people had become the engine of the attention economy we were depicting in the film -- and the Craftocene future we were building felt like a genuine alternative logic, not just a visual one. I started my masters in Data, Inequality and Society the following year, with the goal of exploring these concepts further so it's nice to reflect on this project as part of what pointed me there.