YouTube Link: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ox6ZgEnMZeQ
doomscroll is an expression of my deep dissatisfaction with the state of online culture. When I was a kid, the internet was somewhere I could find companionship during a lonely childhood. I made friends and enemies, met mentors and lovers, and experienced all manner of teenage drama that feels rather insignificant now. In many ways, the internet molded me into the person I am today, in a mostly positive way. However, the internet feels... different now.
Before, the internet always felt like a sandbox to me, a place where creativity reigned. However, in my experience the internet is now very corporate. Everything aims for profit over substance, and even companies whose brands revolve around concepts like creativity, like YouTube, push their users towards content that is meant to addict rather than to engage. All that is wanted is for us to keep watching, to keep clicking, and to keep mindlessly handing over our personal data and information to sell again and again and again. Additionally, the internet is now a tool of mass surveillance. Companies stalk our social media accounts when considering whether or not to hire us, and one tiny mishap can echo across one's entire career.
In short, the modern internet is exhausting. It is an endless vortex of stimulus and eye candy, almost all of it meant to simply melt our brains. And yet, I can't escape it. I and so many others now rely on the interconnection that the internet offers, both for news and community. I still have very close friends that I can only talk to through online means. I hate the worst of it all, but I cannot live without the best of it.
To communicate these frustrations in my piece, I decided to feature myself within it. I would sit and scroll mindlessly on my phone as visual chaos would be projected onto the wall behind me. I originally planned to feature news articles, social media posts, memes, and more, but I ultimately decided to focus on news articles so that the overall look wouldn't be so cluttered that the viewer could still tell what was happening.
To create my background gifs, I took screenshots from many different articles in many different genres from news sources across the political spectrum, along with some articles from satire sites like The Onion. I felt that the inclusion of both "real" and "fake" news was important in order to emphasize how difficult it can be to distinguish between the two these days. Then, I layered the screenshots on top of each other repeatedly until I felt it was impossible to get too good a look at any of them, then layered the resulting gifs on top of each other to cause further confusion in the final projection. I really wanted to drive home how information overload often means that we never truly take anything in, only ever interacting with content on a surface level.
As a final touch, I used notebook paper to add additional texture to the wall. These pages, covered in mad scribblings and ripped and crinkled to hell, are meant to represent my mental state while trapped in an internet rabbit hole. Anger, despair, confusion, and the feeling of being watched all come together on these conspiracy-board-adjacent papers to add to the hectic, claustrophobic feel of my piece.
Finally, that just leaves... me. Eyes locked on my phone screen, tangled up in wires, and wearing headphones to block out the outside world even more effectively. I am in a room overflowing with people, and yet I am helpless, hopeless, and alone. I wanted to drive home a sense of isolation, a feeling anyone who uses social media extensively is likely very familiar with.
This piece is probably the closest thing to protest art I've ever done. Creating it and developing it felt like screaming. Hard. Of course, I know I'm only complaining about an issue without providing any sort of solution, but I feel this piece is more meant to be a reaching out. An assurance to others that we're not crazy, that we're all experiencing this strange, manipulative machine together. I may be displaying my own isolation, but I hope that maybe it will help someone else feel less alone in their own entrapment. At the very least, I just wanted to feel seen, and I did, so I'm happy with how this piece turned out. I'm very proud of it.
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