The word ‘demos’ refers to the ruling body of citizens in ancient Athens, the first Internet service provider in the USSR, and the small programs and audiovisual presentations produced by people from the computer art subculture ‘demo scene’ to show off their skills. As if we were to embark on one of this subculture’s demo parties, we immerseourselves into a digital primordial soup in Ida Kvetny’s work DEMOS, passing spiked bodies, cyborgs, and chimeras with contorted limbs. Rigged and glitched, they make us aware of the metallic technology taking over our reality while hands reaching out from the wall remind us how all worlds are created and, thus, possible to remake. 

 

By hacking reality’s software, Kvetny’s work presents a demo of how the world might look. To do so, she uses world-building known from fantasy literature and game design where archetypes are reused across the various universes. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) is repeated in Kvetny’s world, referencing Elsa von Freitag – the actual inventor of this game-changing work. Thereby, as a punk reminder of other forgotten female inventors, the work questions the archetype of the male engineer invented after World War II.