Marcos Krivocapich: The Crisis of the Sign and the Hopeful Role of the Art

The lecture and the discussion is the accompanying program of the participative performance Unreal State by Marcos Krivocapich, presented on the 7th September 2026 as part of PLACCC 2026 Festival.
(More info on the performance: https://placcc.hu/en/marcos-kripocivach-unreal-state/)

Writer and director of Unreal State, Marcos Krivocapich is an author, puppeteer and multimedia performing artist from Argentina. He studied Linguistics at the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. His work mainly focuses on experimentation across different formats and genres, political satire and research on the role of collective intelligence in creative processes, as well as ways to represent contemporary issues influenced by new communication technologies and methods of information reproduction and distortion.

In his lecture The Crisis of the Sign and the Hopeful Role of the Artist in 2026 he shreds a light on the theoretical background of the immersive urban walk Unreal State and arises some questions which played a crucial role in shaping the participative performance.

The animated Big Mac on the screens above the counters of any McDonald’s might be the most illustrative and beautiful example of the sublimation of the image. I order the hamburger in the picture, and I’m given a hamburger that does not look like the one in the picture. And we all agree that this is how it works. I am offered a product that looks a certain way, and I order it more or less seduced by its appearance, but by the time it reaches me I already know that I am not going to get the same thing I saw in the picture. If I had to imagine a Big Mac right now, what would be the first image printed in my mind? A perfect representation fed into my head through algorithmic advertising, or the sad product of the material conditions of fast-food production?

In some way, this is what the crisis of the sign in Western values is about.

By rather whimsically combining Baudrillard’s four stages of the simulacrum and his concept of simulation, the ideas of hyperstition and the Human Security System developed by the CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) and Nick Land, Curtis Yarvin’s political critique, and a little of Yuk Hui’s ontology of digital objects, I will try to sketch an explanation of what signs do to us, and how we, from within the alternative cultural industries, might begin to relate to those signs again.

To play freely with them. To break them apart and reassemble them into mutants. To escape categories that once seemed untouchable, simply for the pleasure of hacking the sign: and, perhaps, becoming a little more ourselves in the process.