Seal of the Office of Care

UBERMORGEN · 超明天 within XENO FUTURISM, curated by Adrian Bojenoiu, produced by ElectroPutere at CASA_, Bucharest, 12.09–11.10.2026

An eagle with a heart for a shield. A drone, a server rack, a triangle, arranged in a circle the way a government arranges the things it wants you to trust. Around the rim, three words in a serif that has signed a thousand documents: Protect. Monitor. Nurture. The bird is smiling. It has always been smiling. That is the first thing to notice about the Seal of the Office of Care, and the last thing you should believe.

No such office exists. No procedure authorised it, no body consented to it, there is no legitimate first move. It enters into force the way all real infrastructure enters into force: not by vote, not by founding, but by being published and then behaving as though it had always been there. This is the oldest trick of governance and the newest trick of the platform, and UBERMORGEN is not interested in exposing the trick from the outside. UBERMORGEN performs it. The seal was designed with the same sincerity a ministry would use, the eagle drawn cute on purpose, because cuteness is now load-bearing. Care is the interface. Surveillance is the infrastructure underneath it. The two were never separable, only re-skinned for a softer decade.

The pattern

Around the seal, a wallpaper. A toile pattern in the old sense, the domestic red-and-cream repeat you would find lining a nineteenth-century parlour, except the peonies have been colonised. Look closely and the Tesla T sits inside a flower the way a coat of arms sits inside a flower on real toile. The Meta infinity, the X, an eagle lifted from an imperial seal, a facial-recognition bracket around a faceless head, a drone folded into a spray of leaves, targeting reticles standing in for blossoms, a scatter of runic marks that belong to the same reactionary aesthetic vocabulary the network-state builders have started to wear unironically. Binary code climbs a stem like ivy. This is what FOUNDATIONISM calls aestheticizing the unchosen layer: taking the orchestration layer, the protocol layer, the layer nobody consented to and nobody enjoys, and selecting it anyway, on purpose, as decoration for a room people are supposed to feel safe in.

The pattern is not a critique hung at a safe distance. It is upholstery. It wants to be lived with, the way infrastructure is lived with, ambient and load-bearing and easy to stop seeing. That is the danger it is built to demonstrate.

The room

The wallpaper was hung in an unrenovated monumental house in central Bucharest, plaster failing on the ceiling, a single bulb hanging from a rosette that has watched several regimes come and go. The room is not a white cube pretending to neutrality. It is a specimen. Every monumental house in this part of the world has been occupied, requisitioned, subdivided, returned, and forgotten in some order, and the walls remember more of that sequence than any didactic text could recover. UBERMORGEN's method here follows the Charter's own procedure almost exactly: identify the layer, build the experimental setting, publish the attack, do not execute. The layer, in this case, is the building's own claim to have already been read, already been understood, already settled into being merely old. The attack is to paper it in corporate heraldry and watch what the room does with that. A black platform sits on the red carpet where a piece of furniture once might have, lit from underneath, low enough to read as a plinth, a bed, an altar, an evidence table. It does not resolve. It waits for the room's reaction, because in FOUNDATIONISM the reaction is the research: what the room absorbs, what it refuses, what it cannot help but reflect back under gold light is the actual content of the work, more than anything hung on the wall.

The sound

You know how the silence in a room like this gets loud after enough minutes inside it. The pulse once you finally lie down. The air a house this old has been breathing since before you arrived. Bed of Sound is not played through a speaker at a distance and it is not for headphones, the sound is inside the platform itself, distributed unevenly through the structure the way feeling is distributed unevenly through a body, more here, almost nothing there. Press an ear to it. Lie the full length of yourself along it. Move six centimetres and the room changes again, because there is no single place the piece plays from, the same way there is no single place infrastructure ever plays from, it is always underneath you, always slightly to the left of wherever you are listening.

Nothing announces itself as wrong. Nothing needs to. You are being monitored the way you are being nurtured, from underneath, without a hand ever touching you, and it works, and that is the whole argument the piece makes with no argument stated anywhere. It is normal to want this now. You are well. You can get up now. It has all been recorded.

The website

The site built for this piece is not documentation. It is the third site of the attack, alongside the room and the register. Nothing on it explains itself, because FOUNDATIONISM does not correct, it selects, and a visitor selects the pattern, the seal, or the room the same way they would walk into one of three doors. Each surface behaves on the same rhythm the whole piece runs on: still for two or three seconds, then moving, then still again, a breathing pattern rather than a constant animation, because constant motion is what infrastructure does when it no longer needs your attention to keep running. Consumption is what this work asks for instead. Touch the pattern and hold, and it warps, chromatic edges splitting like a signal under too much load, and then it settles. Touch the seal and it does the same, the eagle's smile intact through the distortion, breaking and recomposing the way an official image is never supposed to. Now and then, mid-motion, it lunges closer, an erratic zoom with no announced cause, the way a camera behind a wall might.

Every image on the site is shown whole. Nothing is cropped to fill a rectangle it was not made for, the seal fits inside its own frame with room to breathe, the room photograph is not stretched to a screen's convenience. This is a small formal decision that is also a philosophical one: an Office of Care that cannot even show you the whole of its own seal is not practicing what it claims on the rim. UBERMORGEN and 超明天, the studio's Chinese name, sit quietly in the corner of every page, the only two words on the site that point outward, to ubermorgen.com, to a practice with a longer memory than this single seal.

Xeno Futurism, and its enemy

This work sits inside XENO FUTURISM, a show built from Hyperstition, Accelerationism, historical Futurism, and Feminism read against each other rather than in sequence, because the future has never belonged to whoever announces it first, only to whoever is willing to fight over what it means once it arrives. Somewhere in the same decade that produced this wallpaper, a different aesthetic project is underway: private, self-governing digital nations, seasteads and sovereign clouds, communities that describe themselves in the language of ascent and heroism and civilisational revival, funded by people who read Ayn Rand as prophecy rather than fiction and are now writing the protocol specification for how artificial intelligence agents will identify, remember, and trust each other. They are not hiding. They publish their own manifestos, their own declarations, their own flags. FOUNDATIONISM and its Office of Care exist in direct proximity to that project, not as parody of it but as its structural twin turned the other way. Same diagnosis, that value migrates down into the layer nobody watches. Opposite answer to the question of what to do once you have seen it.

The Charter of Foundationism names this precisely: a published attack is not executed. The threat is real, the capability is demonstrable, and the demonstration itself is not the work, the withholding is. Seal of the Office of Care makes an eagle, a drone, a server, and a heart into a coat of arms and dares the room, the visitor, the screen, to notice how easily an image like that could be believed. It does not tell you what to do with the noticing. It records your reaction in a register that refuses nothing and settles nothing, the same way the room settles nothing, the same way the pattern, touched and released, only ever returns to still.

Seal of the Office of Care is a work by UBERMORGEN, presented within XENO FUTURISM, curated by Adrian Bojenoiu, produced by ElectroPutere.