The Pizza Index by Sofia Schartner

The Pizza Index is an exploration of the correlation between pizza orders and global conflict. Through images from video games, military manuals and children’s books, the edition explores ludic tendencies in contemporary warfare.

We are witnessing a global shift towards gamified warfare, increasingly delegated to algorithmic infrastructures that transform its vocabulary and very nature. Efforts to trivialise catastrophe in moments of uncertainty now circulate online through White House reels, betting markets or tracking spikes in pizza orders near the Pentagon. The Pizza Index’s capacity to underscore this ludic drift in contemporary warfare also reveals a broader cultural obsession with forecasting and prediction, particularly in relation to geopolitical events.