Project
Descrip­tion

GENESIS & INTENTIONS

KORE. originated from a signal identified while writing my thesis. Reddit became a key research field as I explored the following question: what is the role of humor in acts of digital disobedience? Reddit is both an information source and a live trace of contemporary society, over 100 million daily active users, spanning different ages, nationalities, political opinions, and backgrounds. Its subreddit structure allows immediate, granular access to conversations around any specific topic. For this project, I focused on productivity and self-optimization: self-tracking, glow-up culture, social performance. I found a large number of posts voicing the everyday struggles. What struck me was that most of these posts never questioned the problem itself, they simply sought an efficient solution from the community. Reddit’s anonymity allows users to ask questions they’d never dare to elsewhere under a pseudonyme. In parallel, I became interested in everyday objects as symptoms of late-stage capitalism and systems of domination: quality-rating terminals in public restrooms, treadmills, self-checkout kiosks, smartwatches. Objects that naturalize optimization as a way of life. Combining these two threads, I developed a procedural solution generator, which then disguised itself as a fictional startup selling products.

Late-stage capitalism has a particular talent for care. It listens. It empathizes. It offers solutions. This project began as an attempt to name that talent for what it is: a mechanism of redirection, one that converts structural failure into personal inadequacy, and personal inadequacy into a purchase. The fictional infrastructure of KORE. is built on a real and observable logic. Some Reddit communities have become, in practice, an open-source catalogue of internalized meritocracy. The posts I collected express the deep conviction that success is a matter of personal effort: about habit-building, productivity stacks, the search for the right system that will finally make everything click. At the core of the system is a generator that simulates the authority of artificial intelligence without its complexity. Nuanced, context-saturated testimonies are flattened into binary tags. Tags generate a specific need and a combination of objects that become one final product. Seductive in aesthetics, absurd in function, unsettling because these processes and objects might already exist. KORE. is not a projection of a possible future. It is a slightly enlarged reflection of the present.

Project by Tara Hächler

Tutoring by Félicien Goguey

Master Media Design, HEAD — Genève, 2026