Cybernauts is a mobile-first browser-based series hosted at cybernauts.jamesmalzahn.com. Each work asks the visitor to perform small actions while the interface interprets those actions as evidence about identity, humanity, consent, or risk.
Network Conditions, Season 01
Cybernauts 001, Consent Is Not a Button, examines the gap between clicking agreement and meaningfully understanding what a system can infer. Cybernauts 002, The Human CAPTCHA, asks visitors to prove they are human through increasingly subjective and machine-judged tests.
Cybernauts 003, The Inferred Self, turns touch, hesitation, correction, stillness, swiping, and optional device orientation into a procedural behavioural portrait and a fabricated identity document.
The system only needs an actionable version of you
The series does not claim to discover a true inner self. It demonstrates how easily small interactions can be converted into confident-seeming claims, classifications, and visual identities.
The central proposition is that a computational system does not need to know who someone really is. It only needs to produce a version of that person that can be acted upon.