Instruments of Belief: The Victory Box

Abstract

Instruments of Belief: The Victory Box is the written component of my graduate creative-research thesis, supporting an installation that uses parafiction, fabricated archives, and artificial intelligence to construct a plausible but entirely fictional Cold War media history. The project centers on The Victory Box — a fabricated “home security” device presented as a historical object — surrounded by a sequence of installations that behave as evidence of its existence: a 1990s investigative documentary generated with AI, a reconstructed 1950s living room where the Box functions, an AI-generated interactive video portraying itself as footage from a security control room, and a final archival gesture that subsumes the viewer into the fiction through their own transformed image. The work was built using current generative AI models alongside sculptural fabrication to produce video, audio, images, and documents that feel fully researched and historically grounded while remaining entirely manufactured. The result is a constructed world whose plausibility is both its subject and its method: a critique of how AI can be weaponized for propaganda, surveillance, and psychological operations, built using the very tools it interrogates. Throughout the development of the project, I worked with an AI system I call Lucid, which contributed to prompt design, theoretical discussion, and the broader shaping of the work’s fictional framework. Rather than addressing these issues didactically, the installation stages them as an embodied encounter. It records viewers, transforms their images, and repositions them within an archive that appears historical, asking viewers to confront how deeply people today remain embedded within systems of surveillance, persuasion, and belief that often fade into the background of everyday life.