Wake Me Up inside: Digital Sovereignty and Post-Platform Futures

Hosted at Wilshire Online in collaboration with SUPERCOLLIDER this exhibition explores the psychic, cultural, and infrastructural conditions of life lived through platforms and computational systems. Borrowing its title from the chorus of Evanescence’s 2003 anthem “Bring Me to Life”; a song that resurged to top charts nearly two decades after its release. Wake Me Up Inside reflects on the return of a distinctly emotional register shaped by longing, dependency, alienation, and the desire to feel present again. The exhibition situates this resurgence within a contemporary condition in which everyday experience is increasingly mediated through systems that translate attention, human psychology, and social life into metrics, content, performance, and behavioral data. What once appeared as technologies of connection now structure emotional life itself.

Evolving from the utopian ideals of the early internet as spaces for openness, experimentation, and liberated exchange, online networks have evolved into infrastructures of extraction, behavioral capture, self-surveillance, and monetized attention. Logging on now often feels less like entering a communal space than returning to work or searching for a dopamine spike. At the same time, Wake Me Up Inside resists pure technological pessimism and speculative doom forecasting. The forthcoming public program series turns toward artists and technologists building alternative systems, local networks, autonomous infrastructures, and speculative post-web worlds. Responding to a growing desire for forms of collective technological life rooted in agency, exchange, and shared control over the systems we inhabit, the program asks what new social and cultural possibilities might emerge beyond the platform economy.