For a practice so intertwined with every facet of human life as image-making and significance expression, parsing out ways to reap the gains while pruning counterproductive mechanisms is not a straightforward process. To prohibit imagery outright feels overly ascetic, and to advocate reclamation or revolution abdicates the responsibility the collective shares in creating our modern image machine. So, perhaps, the reshaping comes from the beginning, where significance originally formed – in the private consciousness of individuals. How do we become more conscious participants?

Muse Mfg. is an ongoing artistic inquiry into the intersection of images, meaning, culture, and technology, pursued through forms capable of making those relationships perceptible. This essay is one such form. The living art exhibit Graze & Praise is another: a deliberately constructed situation designed to interrupt the habitual mechanisms through which images acquire meaning. By incorporating wearable art, installation, performance, and participatory ritual, it presents participants with unfamiliar images without the familiar cultural cues, asking them to confront their own responses before consensus has had an opportunity to dictate them. Moreover, rather than simply observing, participants are asked to respond by placing tokens before the works that resonate with them, gradually making visible the collective patterns of attention and significance that emerge over the course of the exhibition. 

The visual forms and symbolic compositions presented here resist immediate categorization. They are not familiar saints, national heroes, corporate logos, celebrities, political symbols, or established myths. There is no inherited consensus telling the participant what is important, beautiful, virtuous, desirable, ridiculous, grotesque, or worthy of reverence. Deprived temporarily of these familiar cultural anchors, participants have to confront a comparatively unusual question: What do I think?

That is a difficult question to answer, and perhaps one that does not hold enough contemplation. We are accustomed to encountering images accompanied by an enormous amount of metadata – who made them, what they are called, how much they cost, who owns them, who commissioned them, what they represent, which communities claim them, and how we are expected to behave towards them. Even before we have consciously observed, a tidal wave of biological and cultural heuristics have already determined our interpretation.

While it is not possible to produce a pure pre-cultural response, Muse Mfg. attempts to interrupt that thought pattern, even if only briefly. When participants are confronted with visual situations where immediately recognizable social consensus is absent, the initial interpretation and judgement have to become more personal.

Then, without grand fanfare, each participant externalizes these private intuitions through the ritualistic placement of tokens. As those choices accumulate, a symbolic landscape takes shape. Individuals no longer respond only to the artworks, but to the community of individuals. Attention settles, negotiations transpire, and patterns form. What eventually becomes an established symbol or obvious meaning may have begun as nothing more than someone’s initial act of attention. 

Yet the event is not about the pageantry or the ranking – it is about interrogating the moment of reaction, internal and external. It is an opportunity to participate in the fleeting early stages of symbol formation and culture development. What happens in the instant before we know what we are supposed to think? What does attraction feel like before we can justify it? What happens when we discover that hardly anyone else seems to value the thing we value? What happens when we realize that our judgement has changed simply because other people have gathered around something else? 

These are small interruptions, but they are precisely the kind of interruptions that contemporary image systems tend to eliminate. Their efficiency depends upon reducing uncertainty, accelerating recognition, and making significance legible. Muse Mfg. introduces uncertainty deliberately, not in an attempt to escape culture, nor to pretend that individual judgement exists independently of it, but, for a small moment, to make the process of cultural formation perceptible and participatory again.

Whether the images displayed at any event endure is almost beside the point. They may be forgotten by the next day, but that does not make the experience meaningless. In fact, their ephemerality is part of the experiment. The objects are temporary; the process they reveal is as old as humanity. What matters is the opportunity to witness something that usually unfolds invisibly: the remarkable human tendency to seek significance, to externalize it through images, and to negotiate that significance together.

Muse Mfg. is therefore not an argument against images, nor an attempt to manufacture a new system of approved meanings. It is an invitation to step momentarily outside the familiar machinery of evaluation and observe our own participation in it.

What might we discover if we watched significance being negotiated before it became culture?

Perhaps that is where a more conscious image culture begins: not by destroying the machine, but by becoming aware of the moment when we hand our judgement over to it.