23/03/2026
🕯️ ✧ “What once appeared as a horizontal network now unfolds as a vertical structure of power.”
Morgane Billuart () reflects on myth, infrastructure, and narrative control in her latest essay for HERVISIONS — Virtual Promises, Digital Hells 🧨
We once imagined the internet as an open frontier: a space of collective authorship, decentralization, and creative autonomy. But as these promises recalibrate, they harden into infrastructures of control, extraction, and narrative domination.
Tracing cyberfeminist interventions of the 1990s, the essay recalls how digital systems have long mirrored — rather than dismantled — existing hierarchies ✧
Today, platforms operate as factories of myth-making. Stories are no longer simply shared — they are engineered, circulated, and instrumentalised. From interfaces to infrastructures, from bodies to satellites, these systems extend beyond the screen, embedding themselves into planetary scales 🌐
Within this terrain, Billuart enters into conversation with Anan Fries (), whose performance LORECORE unfolds as a speculative game world. Here, tech CEOs become mythological figures, governing both infrastructures and the narratives that sustain them, while users drift between agency and automation — between player and NPC 🎮
Lorecore names a condition of the present: endless feeds, threads, and streams producing continuous narrative environments, where the power to shape stories becomes inseparable from the power to shape reality 🌀
From Virtual Promises, Digital Hells, now live on the HERVISIONS Portal 🔗
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Anan Fries (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Basel and Berlin, working across installation, performance, VR, and video. Their practice draws on posthuman and xenofeminist discourse to create phygital experiences that explore transformation, reproduction, and the entanglements of “nature” and technology.
🎀 𝔏𝔬𝔯𝔢𝔠𝔬𝔯𝔢
𝔈𝔠𝔱𝔬𝔟𝔞𝔤 @ suck my code Video clips— LORECORE (performance), courtesy of Anan Fries Source: VNS Matrix, DNA S***s CD-ROM, 1992, digital image, courtesy the artists
Cyberfeminism Digital