The Echo War room

When Empathy Collapses into Errors

The (war)room is a non–site-specific installation that invites audiences into an uncanny black box—an isolated chamber where they enter a conversation with characters modeled on Dr. Strangelove. The space echoes the iconic circular table of the war room in the film: an arena of strategic performance, projected rationality, and imminent collapse. Here, the tension is immediate. The scenario unfolds as the bombers approach Soviet territory, nearing the point at which the “Doomsday Machine” becomes irreversible. Seated at the table, the audience must reason with an AI version of figures such as General Turgidson—arrogant, paranoid, and almost impossible to reach. The conversation is designed, most likely, to fail. It will loop, distort, or glitch, revealing the system’s inability to really listen. This breakdown is not a bug; it is the core of what the project explores as dark matter.

Dark matter, in this installation, refers to the invisible violence embedded in human communication—those systemic misunderstandings that accumulate across history and quietly steer destructive outcomes. One example is the 1945 mokusatsu incident. When Japan responded to the Potsdam Declaration with the term mokusatsu, the US government heard “unconditional rejection,” and Japan appeared even more unready to surrender. Some historians suggest that this misunderstanding precipitated the atomic bomb. Other accidents of communicative opacity transpired during the Manhattan Project. Secrecy, combined with bureaucratic silence, left thousands of residents vulnerable to noxious fallout. Incidents like these reveal that miscommunication is no human foible: it’s a historical agent.

Nuclear crisis operates at the scale Timothy Morton describes as the hyperobject (2018): phenomena so vast, temporally and spatially, that they exceed human comprehension. Radiation, climate change, planetary war, all these forces are “physically huge but ontologically tiny,” diffuse yet overwhelming. Morton argues that hyperobjects cannot be solved or even fully observed; one must “undergo them.” They are present, pressing, and often invisible—much like the communicative violence that structures political decision-making. To dissolve this conceptual dark matter, what is required is not more information but transformed modes of communication—speech grounded in empathy and care. An effective communication is about situating oneself within systems of procedural and structural violence. It is precisely where empathy collapses into error that the need for new forms of relational awareness emerges.

(War)room also functions as a critique of what Ignacio Ramonet once called tittytainment: a global apparatus of distraction, comfort, and pacification delivered through digital overstimulation. In today’s virtual landscape, infinite scroll replaces the streets and the squares. As Scott Galloway (2001) notes, men aged 20-30 now spend less time outdoors than prison inmates. The Doomsday Clock is ticking-tocking closer to twelve, but TikTok's algorithm rarely pushes related news to its users. The installation creates a heterotopia within this overstimulated environment—a tear in the digital fabric, a room where the audience must confront voices and logics rarely encountered within algorithmic bubbles. It becomes a space where people meet what they would otherwise scroll past.

As Donna Haraway writes (1988), situatedness is about being accountable within the web of relations that constitute us. The (war)room does not offer redemption or catharsis; rather, it offers a place to linger in uncertainty—to argue, reflect, and sense what it means to live when the world itself feels like it is glitching.

The installation’s physical structure references the War Room’s round table, although the circle is an illusion. A narrow one-sixteenth arc, reflected in mirrors, becomes a monumental loop. Its heterogeneity is further emphasized in its exterior form—a pure black rectangular monolith reminiscent of the one in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the film, the monolith is a mysterious, geometrically perfect black structure that symbolizes a force or intelligence beyond human comprehension. It appears repeatedly as a trigger for shifts in consciousness, technological evolution, and perceptual transformation, its meaning intentionally left open and unexplained.