Digital Shadows and Natural Forces: Rune Bering in Dialogue with Fakewhale
Rune Bering’s work reveals the hidden infrastructures that shape our world, whether digital networks, economic systems, or ecological cycles. Through sculptures, installations, and time-based media, he excavates the entanglements between nature, technology, and human behavior, often exposing how efficiency-driven systems affect both the physical and virtual realms. His projects, from Wi-Fire to Freedom and Happiness and Bycatch, turn overlooked materials into poetic investigations of power, loss, and transformation. FakeWhale had the opportunity to speak with Bering about his artistic process, the themes that drive his practice, and the questions he hopes his work will leave unanswered.
Fakewhale: Your work often highlights invisible infrastructures, whether the algorithms behind social media, the economic forces shaping digital imagery, or the environmental impact of data networks. What first drew you to this way of looking at the world?
Rune Bering: I’ve always been skeptical of the societal structures I’ve been a part of, and I try to stay aware of the assumptions and conditioning that influence me. By digging into what things are really made of and how they’re connected, you start to get a clearer understanding of what you’re looking at, without getting deceived by your senses. There are almost always surprises when you look beyond the surface or behind the facade of what you immediately perceive.
Back in 2019, I created the exhibition My username is Darina94, which focused on a series of spam emails I had received. By deconstructing these emails, I uncovered a bizarre and fascinating world where a language was developed to trick Unicode (the system that lets computers communicate across different alphabets and languages). The texts were taken from conservative romance novels where lonely souls met their one true love in the beautiful Rocky Mountain landscapes. The emotionally charged literature, hidden as invisible text in the emails, let the spam content slip through the filters. My exhibition explored the surprising affinities between personal relationships and spam, sex ads and love, intimacy and apathy, while raising questions about the relationship between humans, space, and technology.
In Wi-Fire, you transform routers and screens into a flickering digital bonfire, suggesting a parallel between ancient communal rituals and today’s networked isolation. What inspired this connection, and how do you see technology reshaping our sense of togetherness?
I remember noticing that the flames from a campfire have the same hypnotic effect as a screen. Both technologies consist of movement, light, and sound, and are hard to look away from once you’re staring at them. But fundamentally, the two situations are quite different. With Wi-Fire I wanted to create a link between the origin stories of communication beginning with gathering around the fire, and the way we now meet online and communicate without our bodies being present.
I was inspired by Alvin Lucier’s 1969 sound piece I Am Sitting in a Room. Lucier recorded himself reading a text, then played the recording out into the room while re-recording it. The new recording was played back into the room and then re-recorded again. This process was repeated until his words disappeared, leaving only the resonance of the specific room behind. In the Wi-Fire installation, there’s a single video of flames playing on all the screens. But the video has been uploaded and downloaded across different social media platforms hundreds of times. Each platform has compressed the video differently, so the sound, movement, and colors appear in various altered forms. The physical fire is now experienced as distorted digital movements — and you’re looking into the underlying algorithms that prioritize differently how the video is compressed.
Wi-Fire is an exploration of what a social situation is made of when we meet without our bodies, in communities that we don’t really know. To me, individually sitting in front of our screens, spending an escalating number of hours online, deep into dopamine-driven dependency, isn’t doing any good for the communities we’re part of—or for our sense of connectedness.
The moth metaphor in Wi-Fire is particularly striking, drawn to artificial light despite its harm. Do you see the attention economy as something we are doomed to submit to, or do you believe awareness can break the cycle?
The experience economy has turned us all into addicts. Most people want to break free from spending so much time in front of a screen, but they can’t. Acknowledging the problem is one thing, but fighting it is a tough battle. The forces behind keeping us scrolling are powerful and they are perfectly designed to exploit our behavior.
Tobacco companies were also incredibly good at optimizing products to create addiction. When I think back to my childhood, when my parents would smoke in the car while I sat in the back, it’s clear that a lot has changed since then. Maybe we’ll reach a point where we want a more exciting life than the one tech companies are selling us, and we’ll look back with a smile, thinking, “Wow, that was a pretty stupid time.” (Brain rot times)
Freedom and Happiness explores the commercialization of emotions through butterfly stock images, raising questions about how nature itself is repackaged as a product. Do you think digital capitalism has changed the way we experience nature, even outside of online spaces?
I think digital capitalism has changed our concept of what nature is and what it looks like. It’s similar to how most people think lobsters are red because they’ve only seen them in cartoons or cooked at a restaurant. Or like when images of extinct butterflies are sold as stock photos, maintaining the idea of something that exists and flutters around in the ‘real’ world, even though it’s no longer here.
The pace and purpose between natural and technological beings are very different. So, of course, our lives with media that constantly entertain us and follow a specific logic have changed the way we experience nature. But I believe we’ll always be able to reconnect with nature, and there’s something comforting in that.
Nature stimulates many contrasting tendencies compared to what we know from the attention economy: calm, focus, connection, etc. In nature, you can tap into a sense of meaning and connectedness. Maybe, in the future, we’ll collect these kinds of experiences – rather than the short-lived highs from the experience economy that only give us a quick fix in the here-and-now.
The extinct butterflies you digitally resurrected in Freedom and Happiness exist in a space between loss and rebirth. How do you approach the tension between nostalgia for what’s gone and the possibilities of new digital life?
That’s a good question. Nostalgia can be a misleading feeling. But I don’t think the real sense of loss caused by the extinction of species happening right before our eyes can be categorized as nostalgia. And I don’t believe in digital life or intelligence. While there may be potential in new digital technologies for understanding and experiencing aspects of nature, unfortunately, most digital technology has been developed with commercial interests in mind, which do not contribute to fostering a closer connection with nature.
Bycatch brings together traditional fishing craftsmanship and technological materials, creating a dialogue between past and future. How did learning the rare craft of wader binding influence your thinking about contemporary efficiency and its unintended consequences?
Our (Western) society is measured by economic returns and efficiency. The infrastructures around us are optimized for transport, development, consumption, and “progress” or acceleration. That’s why it feels like falling behind when you start something like the incredibly slow, repetitive process of net weaving (I used copper cables, which made it even slower). But it’s also a process that can feel satisfying and meaningful.
In a techno-hopeful wet dream, humans might be freed from all physical labor. But meaningful work and a connection to the things we interact with are essential for a good life. Making something with your hands feels good. And it’s comforting to know that when the world falls apart, I can make my own fishing net and survive 🙂
The use of copper cables in Bycatch evokes both lifelines and entrapment, linking the circulatory systems of marine life and digital infrastructure. What role does material choice play in shaping the narratives of your installations?
In my work, I use materials that can connect subjects across vast divides and time periods. To me, ideas and materials are in constant dialogue with each other. The materials support the ideas, but also build upon them. When I experiment with materials, new ideas and insights come up which I couldn’t have reached through research alone.
The recycled copper I’ve used comes from the infrastructural cables that form the foundation of our entire electrical society. Copper is a material with many technological qualities, particularly as a conduit, and it exists in every digital device. But it’s also a material that points backward, to art history, and it has a strong physical presence.
The ouroboros symbol appears in Bycatch as a metaphor for cycles of destruction and rebirth. Do you see this as a hopeful concept, or more of a warning about systems that consume themselves?
At its core, I see the ouroboros as a force that helps to regulate the energies that govern our world–so maybe it’s a hopeful concept in that way. For me, the ouroboros symbolizes the connections and relationships between all things, both material and spiritual. There’s also an alchemical link, which fits well with my approach to materials.
Across your projects, there’s a recurring question about agency, whether in nature, technology, or human systems. Do you think we have the power to redirect the structures we are caught in, or is resistance just another form of participation?
I love this quote from Schopenhauer:
‘Man can do what he wants, but man can’t want what he wants.’
I think it’s striking, especially for the time we live in. If we ever believed that humans set themselves apart from animals by not being driven solely by impulses and personal needs, digital capitalism has taught us otherwise. We live surrounded by marketing strategies that, through new media and behavioral psychology, are becoming increasingly opaque, trapping us in patterns that aren’t good for us in the long run, but they feel good in the moment.
But I’m also an optimistic person who believes there’s always a way out of this attention crisis
Looking ahead, what directions are you interested in exploring next? Are there emerging technologies or ecological concerns that you find particularly urgent in your current research?
Following up on the last question, I’m currently focused on exploring whether there’s any real freedom of choice in our ‘culture of freedom.’ Is it possible to break free from the structures we’re caught in? Can we make independent choices that can personally, artistically, and socially transform who we are and our ideas of where we’re headed?
I plan to continue working with the sea as a framework, where the connections between continents, imbalances in privilege, and years of exploitation of nature are highlighted. I’m also working with the group dynamics of fish species in the sea as a way to dive into allegories about moral questions, vices, and virtues, which, hopefully in a fun and surprising way, probe into the mechanisms of society.
fakewhale
Founded in 2021, Fakewhale advocates the digital art market's evolution. Viewing NFT technology as a container for art, and leveraging the expansive scope of digital culture, Fakewhale strives to shape a new ecosystem in which art and technology become the starting point, rather than the final destination.
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