MFA THESIS EXHIBITION · 2026
An immersive parafictional installation about surveillance, synthetic evidence, and the systems that manufacture trust.
A plausible past built with the tools of the present
The Victory Box is an immersive parafictional installation that reconstructs a fictional Cold War domestic surveillance program through a hand-built electronic object, an AI-generated documentary, a synthetic archive, a furnished living room, and an interactive monitoring system. The installation places visitors inside a system that captures, transforms, and recontextualizes them, allowing them to feel what it is like to be caught within a persuasive narrative engine.
Visitors first encounter the device through the visual authority of public television and museum display. Framed advertisements, government records, field photographs, and technical documents establish a coherent history around an object that never existed. The domestic installation then makes the Victory Box feel ordinary: a reassuring household appliance offering entertainment, safety, and civic connection.
Inside the monitoring area, live and previously recorded gallery footage is composited into an AI-generated security film. The visitor becomes both audience and subject. By using generative media to construct an entire system of mutually supporting evidence, the work connects Cold War propaganda and psychological operations to contemporary surveillance, artificial intelligence, and the destabilization of visual truth.
“Experiencing information is quite different than simply reading information.” — James Malzahn
Five movements
The installation is structured as a gradual transfer of trust. Each environment confirms the fiction established by the previous one until the visitor’s own image enters the system and changes the status of everything already seen.
A 20-minute synthetic documentary styled as a mid-1990s public-television investigation introduces the supposed history of the device. AI-generated interviews, archival footage, documents, narration, and VHS-era degradation establish an institutional voice the viewer already knows how to trust.
Advertisements, government forms, technical records, field-study photographs, public figures, and owner documentation extend the fiction beyond the screen. The archive does not merely illustrate the story; it performs the evidentiary labour that makes the story feel historically settled.
A reconstructed mid-century interior invites visitors to sit with the Victory Box as though it were ordinary furniture. Warm wood, familiar upholstery, period lighting, entertainment programming, and the promise of safety allow surveillance to enter the home through comfort rather than force.
AI-generated security agents appear to observe a wall of monitors while a browser-based system inserts live and previously recorded gallery feeds into the fictional scene. Visitors see themselves occupying the same image-world that had seemed historical only moments before.
A concealed spoken trigger can interrupt the surveillance system with a direct address from the fictional reporter Tom Robertson. The history is disclosed as fabricated, while the propaganda tactics, surveillance mechanisms, and generative technologies behind the experience are identified as real.
Moving-image work
The complete gallery film runs 20 minutes and stages the Victory Box as a recovered Cold War program through the visual language of a 1990s investigative broadcast.
Press play to view the documentary. Sound is part of the work.
Installation views
These photographs document the completed MFA thesis installation at the University of Waterloo Art Gallery. Open any image for a larger view.
Installation photography by Scott Lee.
Synthetic transformation · process study
This source-and-transformation pair demonstrates how the project uses generative AI to move a contemporary subject into the visual codes of the 1950s. Drag the control to compare the original source image with its synthetic historical double.
Parafiction and synthetic evidence
The Victory Box begins with a fictional object: a Cold War-era home security console supposedly distributed to selected households under a public safety program. Its wooden cabinet, rounded edges, period controls, speaker grille, camera, and small display make the device feel discovered rather than invented.
The exhibition gives this object a history. A synthetic investigative documentary, advertisements, field photographs, manuals, and government records operate as mutually reinforcing evidence. Each component borrows the visual authority of a recognizable institution: public television, the museum, the archive, consumer advertising, and state documentation. The fiction becomes persuasive not because any single image is flawless, but because the images agree with one another.
This strategy connects the history of psychological operations and integration propaganda to the present conditions of generative media. Contemporary AI can produce not only one false photograph but an entire supporting world: witnesses, documents, moving images, voices, technical diagrams, and institutional narratives. The work uses these capacities critically, making their persuasive force spatial and experiential.
The viewer is not left outside the system. A camera embedded in the Victory Box records short clips, while another camera captures the monitoring area. A local browser-based compositor maps live and recorded material onto the monitors watched by synthetic security agents. The visitor becomes an operational image: a picture made not merely to be viewed, but to perform surveillance and classification inside the installation.
The final interruption does not dismiss the fiction as a trick. It separates historical accuracy from operational truth. The Victory Box never existed, but the methods used to make it persuasive - surveillance, emotional reassurance, institutional authority, synthetic evidence, and automated image processing - are real and increasingly ordinary.
Available for presentation
The installation can be configured for a dedicated gallery, media-art venue, university gallery, festival, or museum. Each presentation is adapted with the venue while preserving the progression from institutional belief to personal implication.
The complete visitor journey, including the documentary, framed synthetic archive, furnished domestic interior, functional Victory Box, interactive Monitoring Room, and triggered disclosure.
A reduced presentation centred on the Victory Box, documentary, selected archival works, and a compact monitoring intervention for smaller galleries, screenings, and festivals.
Premiere exhibition
University of Waterloo Art Gallery
Gallery One: MFA 2
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
May 14–30, 2026
Exhibitions · Curatorial inquiries · Media
For documentation, availability, technical planning, exhibition proposals, or artist-talk bookings, contact James Malzahn.
jamesmalzahn@gmail.com