Slow, Wrong, Unfit by Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne
CIFRA presents Slow, Wrong, Unfit, a new exhibition by internationally acclaimed artists Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne. Opening today as part of CIFRA’s Power ON/OFF season, the exhibition brings together a selection of works that question the logic of digital systems through humour, critical design, and artistic intervention.
Rather than imagining technologies that are faster, smarter, or more efficient, Brain and Lavigne investigate what happens when digital systems become slow, dysfunctional, or deliberately resistant. Across browser extensions, software projects, videos, and instructional works, the exhibition proposes alternative ways of living with technologies that increasingly shape everyday experience.
Tega Brain, an artist and environmental engineer based in New York, and Sam Lavigne, whose practice focuses on data, surveillance, automation, and computational systems, have exhibited internationally at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian Institution, SFMOMA, the New Museum, ZKM Karlsruhe, Ars Electronica, and Pioneer Works. In 2023, they received the Creative Capital Award for their collaborative research into alternative approaches to carbon offsetting.
The exhibition brings together works that expose the hidden assumptions embedded in digital infrastructures. Instead of rejecting technology from the outside, the artists intervene from within—slowing systems down, misdirecting them, or pushing them toward absurd conclusions. Their projects invite viewers to reconsider ideas of productivity, optimisation, automation, and digital convenience.
Highlights include both individual and collaborative works: Slop Evader (2025), which imagines returning the internet to a moment before the explosion of generative AI; Slow LLM (2026), where artificial intelligence responds at an intentionally frustrating pace; Zoom Escaper (2021), a browser extension that invents believable excuses for leaving online meetings; Slow Hot Computer (2016), where the computer itself resists productivity; The Good Life (2016/2017), exploring the collapse of Enron through its internal corporate archive; Unfit Bits (2015), a humorous manual for misleading fitness trackers; and Synthetic Messenger (2021), examining how online advertising infrastructures influence the circulation of news.
Rather than presenting technological failure as a defect, Slow, Wrong, Unfit considers it as a strategy. The exhibition asks what forms of agency remain available when everyday life is increasingly organised through algorithms, interfaces, metrics, and automated decision-making. Small acts of resistance, delay, or misuse become ways of making these systems visible.
About CIFRA
Founded in the UAE, CIFRA is a curatorial media art platform that creates conditions for the continuous and contextual presence of media art beyond the exhibition cycle. By connecting artists, curators, galleries, institutions, and audiences, CIFRA extends the life of digital artworks through curated programming, streaming, and digital presentation, supporting the long-term visibility of media art within the international cultural ecosystem.