Objective Psyche Gallery Show

Objective Psyche is a collaborative pen-and-ink comic that lets its online audience vote on where the story goes next. Created by artist Elias Doering, the finished work, alongside the pieces assembled in its making, was presented at Studio M Studio in Montréal on April 25, 2026, with an opportunity to meet the artist.

The project uses social media and public input to build its narrative through visual storytelling. While it begins in pen and ink, Objective Psyche is designed to grow, expanding into a multimedia project as its narrative develops and viewer input shapes its direction. The story unfolds in short, three-panel excerpts, and at the end of each installment, viewers vote on where it goes next, choosing among continuations written by the audience itself.

At the center of the narrative is CAARL (Collective Autonomy Assisted Research Lifeform), a small creature brought to life in a padded cell and named for Carl Jung, the psychotherapist who pioneered theories of the collective unconscious. What first appears to be an inescapable cell is really an opening puzzle, testing the problem-solving instincts of viewers before the story continues on CAARL’s escape.

Objective Psyche explores three central themes: social decision-making, the power of narrative distance, and absolute power as a collective phenomenon. Together, they orbit a single question the comic poses to its audience: if a group holds democratic control over an artistic story as they consume it, how will they use that power?

That question opens onto several more:

1. How will the interacting public wield this power over an artist who has committed himself to a free, open, online project?
2. How will they wield it over the characters within the narrative and what will that reveal about social decision-making under narrative distance? Will the audience prove sadistic, kind, surreal, or simply drawn toward whatever reads as funniest?

Presented as a progressive comic, the project is built to generate a live relationship between viewer, character, and artist, one from which its own artistic tension and resolution can emerge.

At its core, Objective Psyche is conceived as a dialogue between viewer, artist, and medium, carried out through the mechanics of online presentation. The project grew out of an observation Doering made over years of building a following online: that groupthink often takes hold of how people respond to art in digital spaces, with viewers converging on similar jokes or similar instincts for where a story should go.

Giving that instinct a formal voice, Objective Psyche becomes an attempt to map those collective tendencies as they unfold.