Hack the Black Box by Riar Rizaldi

CIFRA presents Hack the Black Box, an online exhibition by Indonesian artist and filmmaker Riar Rizaldi, bringing together a body of moving image works created between 2019 and 2025. The exhibition traces his ongoing investigation into extraction, technological systems, labour, and the often invisible infrastructures that shape contemporary existence.

Rizaldi’s practice moves across cinema, speculative fiction, documentary, and horror, examining how digital technologies are intertwined with geological processes, colonial histories, ecological crises, and structures of power. Rather than treating horror as entertainment, he uses it as a method of inquiry — a way to engage with realities that are dispersed, excessive, or too complex to be fully grasped at once.

The exhibition is structured as a slow revealing of a “black box.” Familiar everyday objects — smartphones, cables, packaging, industrial residue — become entry points into the hidden infrastructures behind digital life. These include mining operations, global logistics networks, platform-based labour, data systems, and environmental extraction. In Rizaldi’s work, technology is never neutral; devices emerge as condensed sites of labour, violence, and historical continuity.

Extraction, for Rizaldi, cannot be separated from colonial histories. The materials embedded in contemporary technologies carry forward long-standing systems of exploitation, while the environmental and human costs of technological production are obscured by seamless design and dominant narratives of progress and innovation.

As Riar Rizaldi notes in the CIFRA interview:

“Technology is like a hammer. It can help you drive a nail, but it can also kill.”

The exhibition includes works such as KASITERIT (2019), BECQUEREL (2021), FOSSILIS (2023), MIRAGE: EIGENSTATE (2024), and Fanfiction: Volcanology (2025). Across these projects, Rizaldi connects fields such as quantum physics, Sufi metaphysics, volcanology, extractive economies, and postcolonial thought into overlapping frameworks of perception and meaning.

Accompanying the exhibition, CIFRA also presents a video interview titled Extraction is Basically Colonialism, where Rizaldi reflects on mining practices in Indonesia, corporate labour structures, technological alienation, and horror as a visual and conceptual strategy for addressing ecological violence and historical trauma.

Ultimately, Hack the Black Box invites viewers into a condition where the boundaries of the contemporary feel unstable — where infrastructures become spectral, historical processes remain unresolved, and the digital world reveals the material systems that sustain it.