After being diagnosed with dermatomyositis on top of long-term multiple sclerosis, artist Amanda Bennetts responded to funeral-home ads she began receiving in her social feeds by building Axis Mundi — a confrontational sculpture that makes invisible data infrastructure visible and literalizes the violence of targeted algorithms.
Amanda Bennetts transformed the experience of receiving funeral-related targeted ads after a serious diagnosis into Axis Mundi, a large sculptural work confronting data collection and surveillance.
Bennetts frames the work as a response to how algorithms can intrude on vulnerable moments, calling it a “techno-fascist monument” and deliberately making it uncomfortable and imposing.
The piece appears in the New26 survey show at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and invites viewers to consider the trade-offs between data’s medical utility and its capacity to be monetised and weaponised.
Bennetts describes the handrails as a way to wound the tech infrastructure: "By trying to pierce it, the steel wounds it." She also refers to the sculpture as a "techno-fascist monument."
Bennetts built the work as a direct response to the experience of having personal health vulnerability reflected back at her through targeted advertising. Where previous generations who were diagnosed before the era of targeted ads might have retreated and relied on medical support, Bennetts felt the presence of algorithms turning private health moments into monetisable signals. She says the ads were "this constant assault whenever I wanted to see my friends' Instagram posts."
Her aim with Axis Mundi is twofold: to expose the hidden physical infrastructure that enables the uncanny intimacy of targeted content, and to create an imposing, uncomfortable object that forces viewers to confront that infrastructure as violent rather than invisible or neutral.
Axis Mundi appears in the New26 survey show at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Bennetts has said she cannot imagine the piece as a domestic object — it was intended to be imposing and uncomfortable — and that she doubts many would want to buy it, though an institutional acquisition would suit its scale and subject.
Axis Mundi is a direct, material reaction to the personal experience of intrusive, health-related targeted advertising. Through repurposed data-centre hardware, obscured screens and piercing stainless steel, Bennetts makes the mechanisms behind that intrusiveness tangible and deliberately unsettling.
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