The internet has radically reshaped how we connect, communicate, and organize. It has enabled global fan communities, empowered worldwide movements such as the Arab Spring, Climate Strikes, Black Lives Matter, and MeToo — and at the same time opened the door to political manipulation and unprecedented influence over public opinion.
Today, social media platforms hold immense power over discourse, data, and transparency. But what does this mean for democracy?
While our digital social fabric evolves at breathtaking speed, political systems change far more slowly. Can our current democratic structures withstand this transformation — or is it time to rethink democracy, social media, or both?
Entangled in Democracy explores the urgent challenges of our time: the erosion of shared realities, inequalities of power and attention, and the gradual weakening of democratic values.
The exhibition is a collaboration between the Exhibition Design class at FH JOANNEUM and the research group Complex Social & Computational Systems (CS)² at the IDea_Lab of the University of Graz.
Exhibition Structure
1. Participative Introduction
The opening space introduces the core concept by visualizing how individual choices and collective values interact through data. Visitors actively shape a dynamic word-based mosaic, revealing how democratic concepts grow, compete, and transform through participation.
2. Fragments of Reality
Small preferences and everyday habits can generate entirely different news realities. A large-scale floor diagram demonstrates how even seemingly non-political data creates radically personalized information streams. Visitors are guided into five distinct “micro-worlds,” where shared reality begins to dissolve.
3. Inequality of Attention
This room presents a factual perspective on structural inequalities embedded in the digital sphere. An analogue textile installation invites visitors to uncover hidden data layers, exposing how visibility is unevenly distributed — and how the Gini coefficient helps quantify this imbalance.
4. Critical Examination of Democracy
The final space marks the dramatic climax of the exhibition. Videos, photographs, texts, sounds, and voices merge into a layered, collage-like composition. This immersive environment condenses and intertwines the exhibition’s themes, encouraging visitors to draw their own connections within a dense audiovisual landscape.
The project was supervised by Anke Strittmatter, Sigrid Bürstmayr, Christoph Neuhold, Lucia Jarosova and Brian Luque Marcos.
