Synthetic Vision Fund

Fictional, and made for an exhibition. This is not a financial service and no money moves.

Summary

A fiction, built for a gallery. Instead of stating the critique, it rebuilds the procedure of a real service. Read, choose an amount, check out, receive a confirmation. Follow that order and what made you believe it becomes visible.

38

invented founders

output · each with an interview and metrics

3 stages

the system decays as you use it

output · normal → images change → collapse

0

visitor actions recorded

output · every stage is reversible

An exhibited website – concept, branding, UI, frontend, generative graphics

Overview

Synthetic Vision Fund is a fictional AI investment platform. It copies the language, interfaces and flows of contemporary startup and venture capital culture. Reading an article, pressing invest, checking out, receiving a confirmation: every motion is reproduced. The result feels like taking part in a legitimate financial system. It was built and exhibited at Merz Akademie, Stuttgart.

Problem

The target is not AI as a technology. It is how interfaces, terminology and design convention manufacture trust. A familiar order reads as evidence on its own.

Key decisions

1. 01Don't state the critique; rebuild the procedure

   Explaining turns the visitor into an observer. Going through the motions is what exposes their own belief.

   →Reading, choosing an amount, checking out, receiving a confirmation – the whole flow of a real service, with nothing missing and no explanatory text inside the piece.

2. 02Let it fall apart as it is used

   If it looks wrong from the start, nobody believes it; if it stays perfect, nothing happens.

   →Every completed checkout advances a stage. Stage 1 is normal, stage 2 changes the images, and in stage 3 closing a window spawns more, with “connection unstable. Do not refresh.”

3. 03Make them wait

   A real service makes you wait while it fetches data, and that wait reads as proof.

   →A deliberate skeleton load on every page (1.5 seconds · design value).

4. 04Logo, loader and background from one piece of code

   Half of why a brand looks plausible is repetition.

   →One radial p5.js animation serves as the logo, the footer pattern and the loading mark.

5. 05Record nothing

   If a visitor's choices persist in the gallery, it stops being a performance.

   →No visitor actions or outcomes are stored, and holding Shift+R for three seconds returns the piece to its first state.

Reflection

What held up

• Reproducing instead of explaining. No critique is written inside the piece. Only someone who walked the procedure sees their own belief.
• Convention, not spectacle, builds trust. A familiar order and familiar words did most of the persuading.

What failed

• I assumed brand polish would do the persuading. It didn't. The order of the checkout steps worked harder than the logo or the generative graphics.
• I underrated the cost of recording nothing. There is no material at all on how far visitors went.

What I would test next

• The deliberate 1.5-second delay (design value) – whether it reads as a signal of legitimacy or just as a slow site. I can't tell the two apart.
• Where doubt begins – at which checkout a visitor notices something is wrong.
• A record of the exhibition – since nothing is stored, next time a person has to keep the observation notes.