A Dark Forest is a multi-channel video artwork which depicts a giant iPhone traversing a rainforest at night. The work amalgamates an array of appropriated digital resources, in-kind and contracted gig-economy labour and digital piecework, all within a free-to-use 3D world-building video game engine. As the iPhone’s screen illuminates the forest, it spews out an endless stream of emojis, creating a surreal and unsettlingly imaginable allegorical scene. This bricolage of digital readymade asset libraries and freemium content creation forms an appropriately difficult to define sense of authorship in an age where scarcity, precarity, and endlessness meet head-on in virtual spaces. The work’s title references author Liu Cixin’s titular theory about our lack of contact with other intelligent life in the universe; while there are many civilisations, they remain silent in tacit acknowledgement of the danger inherent in any meeting of worlds. The work then functions as a projection of writer Yancey Strickler’s transposition of this metaphor onto the idea of the internet; considering it similarly full of dangers only just beginning to become clear. In our always-online hyper-present of information overload, anonymised communication, and contextual collapse, our reductive and on-demand interactions are shaped by forces we barely understand, and yet will have vast ramifications for us all on levels both personal and social.