Frequently Asked Questions

  • HyperObjects is a social media platform where every lifeform has its own profile. Humans can only post in co-creation with a nonhuman being, presence, or force — a river, a mountain, a fungal network, a thunderstorm, a star system, or any other hyperobject. Every post becomes part of a living archive assembled around that being across time.

  • A hyperobject is anything so vast and distributed across time and space that you can never experience it all at once. A mountain, an ocean, a fungal network, a galaxy, or time itself. You can perceive a part of them — but the whole remains a mystery. No matter how far you zoom in or out of anything, you find the same fractal patterns. The term was coined by philosopher and ecologist Timothy Morton. HyperObjects the app makes these entities participants in digital culture for the first time.

  • Every post on HyperObjects is a collaboration between a human and a nonhuman being. There is no algorithm curating your feed. No ads. No filters. No AI-generated content. No likes or public validation metrics. Users pay a subscription rather than paying with their attention and data. The platform is designed for creation, not consumption.

  • Interspecies social media is a platform designed for relationships between humans and nonhuman lifeforms — rivers, fungi, mountains, storms, stars, and other presences beyond human scale. HyperObjects is the first social platform built on this principle.

  • The Hyperobject Virtual Lab was a series of online sessions held between 2020 and 2022, bringing together eleven international artists, researchers, and ecologists to explore artistic and scientific approaches to hyperobjects. It served as a multi-year public research platform that directly informed the development of the HyperObjects app. Participants included artists from Chile, the Philippines, Jordan, Korea, Spain, and the USA working with hyperobjects including #sun, #water, #breath, #flower, #cosmos, and #microbiome.

  • You set up a profile describing where you feel at home, which elements feel like yours, and what lights you up. Then you choose a hyperobject — any nonhuman being, presence, or force — and tag it in your post. You can upload images, audio, and text in any combination and order. Your post joins the living archive of that hyperobject, alongside every other human who has ever posted in relationship with that being.

  • The crosshatch symbol — essentially the same mark as the modern hashtag — has been found in cave paintings across every inhabited continent for over 30,000 years. It is one of 32 geometric signs identified by researcher Genevieve von Petzinger that appear repeatedly across prehistoric sites worldwide. On HyperObjects, the hashtag recovers this ancient gesture for the digital age — a gathering point around realities larger than ourselves.

  • HyperObjects is for creatives — artists, musicians, writers, and designers — who have lost access to their own expression in the noise of shallow content. It is for indigenous communities whose native language is already this: the assigning of agency and personhood to nonhuman beings, and the preservation of stories and cosmologies that oral tradition alone cannot protect. It is for people who have a deep connection to nature and want to express it. And it is for founders and people in tech who build at rapid speed and need a counterbalance — a space of depth and meaning that reconnects them to why they started.

  • HyperObjects is not primarily a climate app, though it addresses the ecological crisis at its root. The ecological crisis is, in our view, a crisis of relationship — we have lost our sense of belonging to the living world around us. HyperObjects proposes that restoring that relationship through daily creative practice, play, and genuine encounter with nonhuman beings is a more sustainable form of ecological engagement than information or activism alone.

  • HyperObjects was founded by Judith Sun, a Berlin-based artist, UX designer, and researcher. The concept originated in 2014 and has been developed through exhibitions at documenta14 in Athens, the 11th Gwangju Biennial in Korea, and institutions across Europe, North America, and the Middle East. The project has received funding from Kunststiftung NRW, the Andrea von Braun Foundation, and the German Ministry for Culture and Science, and was awarded the Kunststiftung NRW Prize for Visionary Future Ideas in 2020.

  • Social technology beyond human scale refers to digital infrastructure designed not around individual human users and their identities, but around relationships with entities distributed across radically different scales of time and space — from microbial life to planetary systems, from local ecologies to galaxies and cosmic time. HyperObjects is an experiment in what social media becomes when it is designed for these scales.