BrainRot Revolution

My doctoral research explores how interactive documentary and video games can be used to cultivate critically literate digital publics. Drawing from over two decades of practice-based media production, I use research-creation to investigate how narrative, gameplay, and speculative design can help audiences understand and reimagine the social, ethical, and political implications of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence. At the centre of my dissertation is BrainRot Revolution, a satirical documentary game where players accelerate AI model collapse as a metaphor for digital decay, ultimately rebuilding a better Internet from its ruins. This absurdist, genre-blending experience invites reflection on how power circulates through data, platforms, and design, while embracing the joy of imagining preferable futures.

My approach is informed by traditions of culture jamming, futures studies, and critical digital literacy. I take inspiration from artists and scholars who are making reflexive work using digital systems to explore and critique these same systems.  From remixing popular game genres to context jamming platforms like Instagram, my work inserts critical messages directly into the media ecosystems they critique. I build playful, participatory experiences that ask: How might we subvert platform logic from within? What happens when we treat the Internet not as a fixed infrastructure, but as a contested, malleable cultural space? By collapsing the boundaries between fact and fiction, user and author, I aim to reclaim space for democratic dialogue in the digital public sphere.

These questions are grounded in a broad theoretical foundation that includes interactive documentary, science and technology studies, futures literacy, and persuasive games. Methodologically, I use production as a mode of inquiry: prototyping playable systems, co-creating with communities, and documenting the knowledge generated through artistic practice. My current research unfolds in two phases: first, the creation of BrainRot Revolution, and second, a reflective analysis of that process through writing, interviews, and multimedia dissemination. Ultimately, I am interested in how media makers can shape the communicative environments in which publics form, and how hybrid forms like games and interactive documentaries might make space for both critique and imagination.