What happens when artists stop resisting simulation and start speaking its native tongue?

In a cultural moment saturated with machine logic, art is no longer pretending to be “real.” It’s metabolising the artificial, not as aesthetic but as infrastructure. Artists like Matteo Rattini, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, and the conceptual writers at Fakewhale aren’t warning us about AI. They’re staging its instincts, exposing the systems we’ve come to call thought.

A sculpture that doesn’t exist. A game that lies to you. An essay that loops like a machine. The Simulation Reflex isn’t dystopian — it’s diagnostic. These works don’t reject illusion, they reveal the reflex that powers it.

This is what happens when performance becomes substrate, and cognition itself is the medium.