Mixtape Metaphysics, a Multimedia Installation Exploring Philosophy, Technology, and Religion

On View at Modern Art Through Fall 2025

Mixtape Metaphysics is a space of deep thought, contemplation, listening, and conversation. Join us to explore pressing questions about technology, religion, AI, machines, consciousness, and reality, through a blend of sound, interaction, and visual art.

The exhibition's central interactive piece, Algorithmic Flipping, features 350 squares on a wall, each concealing pieces of a larger image. Participants receive prompts—some AI-generated, some human-written, some self-generated—directing which squares to flip. As the image gradually reveals itself, viewers contemplate the sources of information that shape our understanding of reality.

To help guide us in this contemplation, visitors may listen to a series of experimental mixtapes created by Franklin & Marshall’s Institute of Mechanical Surround (a production studio, a label, and a workspace for experimental collaborations between scholars, musicians, and artists) through an artful variety of listening stations and situations. Throughout the exhibition's run, a series of events and discussions will further deepen engagement with these themes. Mixtapes include:

• Processing: A Philosophy Mixtape, featuring four groundbreaking audio lectures that reimagine scholarly discourse through the lens of hip-hop and electronic music. Leading philosophers tackle questions like "Are we living in a simulation?" while sound ecologists create immersive soundscapes that bridge academic inquiry and musical expression. This isn't a podcast or a playlist—it's a new form of philosophical engagement.

• Machines in Between Mixtape: part mixtape, part surreal performance, part philosophical experiment, Machines in Between asks you to hear, see, think, and be differently with your machine divinities. Join our eclectic and world-renowned cast of scholars, musicians, filmmakers, and artists on a wild ride through a fun-house of samples, science-fiction, and searing social critique.

• Me & My Monkey and the Origins of AI: A man, a chimpanzee, dreams of automated cognition, lurking insanity, and whispers of “extra-species eroticism.” Listen here, for the first time, to a story that is still unfolding, a story of an encounter between scientific curiosity and animal instincts, a story about the origins of machine learning and our world-hurtling age of algorithmic abjection. Coming in April 2025

Mixtape Metaphysics acknowledges our current technological revival, where artificial neural networks have fundamentally altered our relationship with faith, ritual, and myth-making. The installation provides a refuge for reflection as we navigate our willing submission to devices and algorithms.

We invite visitors to engage with full sensory awareness—let the sonic and visual elements wash over you, embrace the surplus of feeling generated, and join us in reimagining our dance with machine divinities. This is your opportunity to pause and reconsider the world we're creating together.