The Manosphere
Oracles

// Concept

About the work

The Manosphere Oracles is an interactive installation in which you, as a visitor, get into conversation with two divine archetypes: Apollo and Dionysus. Apollo stands for the cold, over-rationalised side of toxic masculinity, the side that dominates politics by preaching duty and stoicism. Dionysus stands for the chaotic, impulsive side. Both figures are assembled from the rhetoric of the manosphere: incel culture, pick-up artists and a certain kind of influencer.

You speak into a microphone. One of these gods answers. The pattern of toxic masculinity is laid bare.

// Process

How it was made

The starting point for this work was a personal investigation into femicide. Doing it, I kept running into the claim that asylum seekers or people of migrant background are to blame. Statistically that does not hold up. What does stand out is that it is almost always a man. Between 2017 and 2021, in 60% of cases it was even an ex-partner. Femicide is a symptom of a problem inside masculinity. That is what made me want to expose its toxicity.

The choice of Apollo and Dionysus as archetypes is inspired by Nietzsche's theory of the two driving forces inside a person. Apollo stands for over-rationalisation and hierarchical toxicity. To my mind that lives mostly in politics and in corporate life, but it also sounds suspiciously like the "grindset" influencers. Dionysus is the obvious, chaotically impulsive side of toxic masculinity. He embraces sexual dominance and disguises it as freedom. He likes drugs, alcohol and excess. He is the kind of man who catcalls women in the street. Two different faces of the same problem.

Technically the installation is built in TouchDesigner combined with Python code. The visitor's speech is processed by Ollama, a language model running locally. That is a deliberate choice, so that visitor input is never used as training data.

The screens stand in portrait, the format of the phone. That is the format in which this rhetoric actually circulates: in the feed, in the scroll, in the endless succession of clips. Letting the gods appear in that same format means they address the visitor from exactly the place where their language already lives.