FAKE & FAKE
What does Fake & Fake do?
We are artists who strive to create work of depth and meaning. About our desire for connection vs. our fear of intimacy. Our desire to express ourselves in spite of our inability to say what we mean. How can we enter the fullness of our humanity and leave computational binaries behind? How can we be brave? We want to expand from black and white thinking into a richer world full of nuance and subtlety. Let's trace a path from the world in which we find ourselves today with all its sorrows–into a new world, richer, wilder, more mysterious, more surreal, more beautiful.
We live in weird times. Consensus reality and the master narrative have vanished, division is rampant–and yet an odd sameness is general across the world. Thinking, living, loving and dreaming has been replaced by liking, swiping, scrolling and shopping, by zeros and ones, logic, bureaucracy and the corporate agenda. Life is simultaneously precarious, desperate and boring.
FAKE NEWS
BED FOR DREAMING
On October 30, 2025, Caterina's show Bed for Dreaming opened at The Jones Institute, an installation and immersive artwork: visual, musical, multisensorial.
Bed for Dreaming invites its participants and celebrants to sleep in an ancient Chinese bed—sleep, and dream—and in dreaming, access the mysterious, the shadowed and otherworldly, the weird and the surprising. With luck they will have dreams to relate, and write in the book provided. Or if their dream is fugitive or forgotten, create one using the dream objects there.
Art and dreaming are some of the last remaining activities undertaken with no particular use, for their own sake, in the shrinking category of the non-economic, for the sustenance of the heart and soul. Art and dreaming take their place alongside such noble pastimes as caring for others, fantasizing, singing tunelessly, dancing non-professionally and praying without contributing to the collection plate. Even going for walks has become a positive wellness activity, producing higher performance and optimal outcomes, and “leisure” is a necessity of the non-machine, in contradistinction to the other, more honorable activity of 9-9-6 “work”.
Bed for Dreaming is a refuge from the modern condition, a metaphorical womb, snug in the unconditional positive regard of The Great Mother, a retreat into safety, ready to embark into the chthonic world of dreams, depth and obscurity.
As the dreams are recorded and collected, Ferran Miquel will compose a cycle of songs, based on them. This is the first of many installations of Bed for Dreaming.
METSÄN HENGET
The current series began with Metsän henget--spirits of the forest–during Covid and has since expanded to include landscapes, families of creatures, spirits, monsters and angels.
COMPOSITIONS
Ferran is a multi-instrumentalist, composer and visual artist working in any and all media. Some musical inspirations? A. Berg - Wozzeck, its serialism and unique dissonance approach creating an hallucinatory vibe; Ligeti - Six Bagatelles: how he explores color and articulation, to sharpen contrast and humor; Ligeti - Musica Ricercata: pitch and pitch-class economy; Luciano Berio - Sequenzas cycle: solo instrument as a whole, polyphonic listening for monophonic instruments, push of the idiomatic limitations of each instrument, theatricality as part of the score; Scriabin - Prometheus: Poem of Life : pitch association with color and scent.
CAREER NARRATIVES
Caterina Fake
is an entrepreneur, writer, and cultural thinker whose career bridges the worlds of art, literature, culture and technology. Caterina Fake's Artist CV is here
She is best known as one of the inventors of social media, having co-founded Flickr, one of the original photo-sharing communities, and Hunch, a pioneering AI company launched in 2008. Her work has reshaped how people connect, create, and discover online, building the foundations of social media and AI that we use today.
Fake’s trajectory into technology was unconventional. She went to art school (Parsons), dropped out and studied literature and psychology at Vassar. She read widely in Renaissance poetry and the postmodern novel, Jungian psychology and art. She left New York and came to the Bay Area to enter the Ph.D. program for Renaissance Studies at UC Berkeley, but left for the nascent world of the internet. Building platforms for people to share images, ideas, and art, she created communities and built the future.
Fake has often said her job is, and always has been, “humanizing technology” which distinguishes her from many of her contemporaries in Silicon Valley. Her belief that creators of software are responsible for their software’s outcomes defies the technolibertarian pieties of the typical Valley technocrat. She has become an influential voice and frequent gadfly in debates about the future of technology.
Fake’s intellectual commitments run deep. Her work is informed by a long engagement with art and literature, mythology, psychology and philosophy. Technology is never only technical. It has human consequences and is a repository for people’s desires, fears, and dreams. In our conversations with AI are hidden our desire for love and connection. A wish for The Great Mother and her unconditional positive regard.
Beyond her own ventures, Fake has been a mentor, advisor, and investor in some of the most significant startups of the past two decades. As a seed investor in Kickstarter and Etsy (and its chairman) she continued to support platforms for creativity. She champions companies and creators who bring imagination, ethics, and cultural awareness to technology. At the same time, she has devoted her energy to supporting the arts and cultural organizations such as Sundance, City Arts and Lectures, the Architecture & Design Museum Helsinki, Southern Exposure, The Briarcombe Institute and McSweeneys. She believes deeply that art, literature, and philosophy are not luxuries but necessities—central to any meaningful human future, especially one entangled with powerful machines.
Her current work continues this lifelong project. She gave a talk at the MoMA in New York in April of 2025 on tech and nostalgia, which is being transformed into a stage performance Yesterday, with theatre director Kevin Newbury. In Fall 2024 her artwork appeared in a group show, Matriarch, and a solo show of her art opened at The Jones Institute in Fall 2025. She is writing Finity, a book that calls for the embrace of limitation in an age of titanium.
Widely recognized as both a visionary and a critic of technology, Fake hosted a podcast called Should This Exist? questioning the Silicon Valley propensity to ignore whether or not something should exist, just because it can. Fake fights for for a better vision for technology, not as an end in itself, but a medium through which humanity might flourish.
Fake has received numerous honors for her contributions to innovation and culture–two honorary doctorates, from RISD, the Rhode Island School of Design, and The New School; inclusion in the TIME 100, Time Magazine’s list of the Most Influential People in the World; and the Silicon Valley Visionaries award, to name just a few. She has had live conversations, on stage and online, with cultural figures such as Werner Herzog, Maria Ressa, Robert Sapolsky and Malcolm Gladwell.
Fake resists simple categorization. She is equally at home in a discussion of venture capital as in a seminar on Greek tragedy, equally engaged by questions of AI ethics as by the uncanniness of a surrealist painting. This breadth is not accidental but essential: for Fake, the boundaries between art and technology, myth and machine, past and future, are porous.
Caterina Fake lives at the confluence of these worlds. As a founder, she has helped invent the future, and shaped the infrastructure of digital life. As an artist writer and thinker, she calls us back to the enduring power of culture, myth, and imagination. She is, in every sense, a maker of worlds—reminding us that the future must be built not only with technology, but with meaning, beauty, and the creative fire that has always defined human life.
Ferran Miquel
is a multi-instrumentalist, composer and visual artist working in any and all media.
"I was born in Calalonia in an orchard of Valencia oranges.
My earliest compositions were made of local textures—percussive onomatopeias , bird calls, the microtonal hum of insects—a rural solfège.
New York City called. I received a full scholarship to The Juilliard School where I deepened my orchestral training. I lived between practice rooms, rehearsal halls and performances at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall (hearing only the second half, since I could get tickets from the patrons who were leaving at intermission).
I won another full scholarship to The New School, where I learned jazz improvisation, avant-garde techniques and visual art. I was drawn to Catalan surrealists like Varo, Dalí, Miró, and Gaudí as models for creativity and imagination. Gaudí’s trencadís–mosaics–inspired me to come up with my own compositional techniques, using methods of fragment and collage.
During the summers I was lucky to play in some of the world’s great training grounds: winning audition-based fellowships to the Pacific Music Festival in Japan; Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara; the Aspen Music Festival; the Tanglewood Music Festival; the National Repertory Orchestra and the Lucerne Festival Academy. Sitting inside those orchestras with extraordinary talented colleagues and legendary mentors and conductors, gave me practical knowledge no classroom could offer. I learned how a bass clarinet line lies under bow pressure (beginning of Rite of Spring), how brass choirs speak in different acoustics (Bruckner symphonies), how a viola section breathes inside complex meters ( Bartok” Miraculous Mandarin) . That high-level performance environment became my blank slate for writing fluently and respectfully for instrumentalists.
Moving to Los Angeles and The Colburn School I learned more musical technique, but also film scoring: working with deadlines, cue sheets, sound-for-picture.
As a performer, I have played with Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at Lincoln Center, performed major works such as the John Williams Tuba Concerto and Marsalis’s own music, and worked with conductors including Esa-Pekka Salonen, Gustavo Dudamel, Sir Simon Rattle, Michael Tilson Thomas, Thomas Adès, Riccardo Muti, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and Christoph Eschenbach.
Across many schools, orchestras, sounds and cities, I never lost what I learned among the oranges: engaging all the senses, I make music and images that invite listeners to look with their ears and hear with their eyes—a Catalan mosaic of sounds and fragments arranged carefully until they sing."
Fake & Fake is a collaboration between Caterina Fake and Ferran Miquel.Through all our desperate posturing on Instagram, our Tinder swiping, our mirthless and compulsive TikTokking–we all want to step into a world of depth and meaning, soulfulness and magic, mystery and chance. Let’s disrupt the disrupters, move fast and shake things up, liberate people from paltry, secondhand desires–and set them to real dreaming.
