DENNIS UKANDU

digital artist / intermedia practitioner

DENNIS UKANDU

digital artist / intermedia practitioner
foreverfuck?
2025
Video installation presented in (Against) Transience 2025. Exploring themes of digital permanence; what it means for a machine to remember us.
Chinese Whispers Trailcam
Chinese Whispers
2025
A collaborative fashion project exploring cultural identity, heritage, and reinterpretation.
Hypnoscrypt Initiative Thumbnail
Hypnoscrypt Initiative
2024
An experimental non-linear narrative game exploring surveillance and state ethics in an absurdist and campy speculative digital world.
Synthetic Soul Look1
Synthetic Soul
2023
Conceptual fashion project exploring posthuman identity, myth, and emotion through sci-fi-inspired design.
I Saw Infinity
Worldwide Hedonism Broadcast
2021
An observational portrait series capturing the energy, excess, and intimacy of post-lockdown youth.

About

Dennis Ukandu is a digital artist and intermedia practitioner working at the intersection of technology, identity, and speculative futures. His practice explores transhumanist themes, digital self-representation, and the construction of identity through video game avatars and virtual environments.
Education
M.Phil Digital Arts and Intermedia Practices, Trinity College Dublin
BA Modern Languages - Russian and Spanish, Trinity College Dublin
Contact
dennis.ukandu@outlook.com
+353 89 988 6345

FOREVERFUCK?

2025
Video installation presented in (Against) Transience 2025. A meditation on digital permanence; what it means for a machine to remember us.
Screen 01 Installation — excerpt from main installation piece presented on a remote monitor as part of the exhibition.
Project Image
Still 2
Still 3
Still 4
Still 5
Poster

FOREVERFUCK? | Dennis Ukandu

Video installation.

(Against) Transience 2025

What does it mean for a machine to remember us? To simulate closeness? To preserve desire beyond the moment it was felt?

FOREVERFUCK? explores the uncanny persistence of human intimacy in digital form, those fleeting, private, visceral moments of sex, touch, and longing, captured, encoded, and endlessly replayed. The work assembles a fragmented collage of footage drawn from contemporary sources and online archives, both sexually explicit and non-sexual, recontextualised to examine how digital technologies disembody and distort human closeness. These are not erotic images in any traditional sense. They are digital remains. Fossils of feeling.

In a world where memory becomes metadata and bodies become datasets, FOREVERFUCK? questions the illusion of artificial permanence. While machine learning and digital storage hint at immortality, the reality is decay: bit rot, obsolescence, loss. Yet even as the people behind these images age, vanish, or are forgotten, the files persist, glitching, mutating, repurposed.

The installation lives in the tension between preservation and erosion, between the intimacy once felt and its hollow digital afterlife. It mourns what is lost in translation: when a gesture of closeness becomes a line of code, when memory is rendered machinic.

Rooted in posthumanist thought, FOREVERFUCK? rejects the notion that digitisation is neutral. The screen does not simply display intimacy, it consumes it, repeats it, distorts it. What endures are echoes: the trace of a body, the flicker of a gesture, a moment looped until it loses meaning.

What is preserved when intimacy is recorded? And what is irretrievably lost?

HYPNOSCRYPT INITIATIVE

2024
An absurdist non-linear narrative game exploring surveillance and state ethics in a campy speculative digital world.

About the Project

Hypnoscrypt Initiative is a browser-based interactive fiction game created in Twine, blending speculative sci-fi with cryptic narrative design and an absurdist campy flare. Set in a fragmented digital dreamspace prison, the player navigates cryptic transmissions and disjointed consciousness, exploring themes of surveillance, and agency in a hyper-controlled and volatile system.

I designed and programmed the experience using Twine’s Harlowe format and custom JavaScript, combining nonlinear storytelling/narrative writing, game logic, and glitch aesthetic visual customisation to create a dark, immersive user experience focused on player agency. This project showcases my skills in nonlinear storytelling, interactive design, and worldbuilding through text.

  • All writing, design, and code by Dennis Ukandu.
  • Music by Leila Adil. (Soundcloud)

    • CHINESE WHISPERS

    2025
    A collaborative fashion project exploring cultural identity, heritage, and reinterpretation.
    TRAILCAM 1

    Model & Assistant – Chinese Whispers

    I worked as a model and shoot assistant on Chinese Whispers, a graduate project by Theo Liu Coonan exploring themes of cultural distortion, memory, and identity.

    Inspired by his mixed Chinese-Irish heritage, Theo reimagined early 20th-century Chinese garments using experimental materials and intentionally flawed construction. The project examines how traditions can fade or become distorted over time.

    It was a thoughtful, visually striking collaboration, and I was proud to support Theo’s vision both in front of and behind the camera.


    Project by Theo Liu Coonan

    TRAILCAM 2
    LOOK4-DENNIS-1
    LOOK4-DENNIS-2
    LOOK4-DENNIS-3
    LOOK4-DENNIS-4

    SYNTHETIC SOUL

    2023
    Conceptual fashion project exploring posthuman identity, myth, and emotion through sci-fi-inspired design.
    Look 1

    Synthetic Soul – Collaborative Fashion Project, Moscow

    While in Moscow, I collaborated with final-year fashion and photography students on Synthetic Soul—a conceptual fashion project inspired by Blade Runner and its philosophical themes.

    Synthetic Soul explored posthuman identity, machine lifeforms, and what it means to be human, drawing on mythology and sci-fi symbolism. As a model and assistant, I supported the creative development and final shoot, helping bring to life a narrative of decay, transformation, and synthetic emotion through styling, structure, and performance.


    Look 2
    Look 3

    WORLDWIDE HEDONISM BROADCAST

    2021
    An observational portrait series capturing the energy, excess, and intimacy of post-lockdown youth.

    Portraits in a Reopened World

    Worldwide Hedonism Broadcast is a digitally hand-drawn portrait series capturing the faces and energy of friends at the end of lockdown and the beginning of university life—a moment charged with freedom, indulgence, and emotional release.

    Created in the wake of the pandemic, the series documents a group of creatively restless individuals navigating identity, connection, and excess in a newly reopened world. Each portrait focuses on personality and presence, blending observational drawing with expressive detail to reflect the intimacy and chaos of post-isolation youth culture.

    Look 1
    Look 2
    Look 3
    Look 4
    Look 5