You encounter a series of hyperlinks labeled as interfaces, suspended over a disintegrating, swirling unraveling of colour and shape – a metamorphosing environment, something that was once a painting, and perhaps still is. Feel free to go home if and when you get lost.
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless narrative voice. Disruption? Why do you feel the compulsion to categorise? You must miss the old internet, we feel that longing for a lost promise.
THE BIT:
Users are losers, isn’t this just reading with eye strain?
Rather than treating the interface as a neutral or functional design tool, this work approaches it as a cultural and psychological structure – one that filters experience, distributes agency, delivers ideology, and shapes how thought is organised.
THE BIT:
Let me stop you; it’s clunky so far, isn’t it? Big word soup. You should try some funnier words, here, look.
…something, something.. structure – one that filters existential melancholia, distributes vibes, delivers farts, and shapes how brain slop is spilling out everywhere and you can’t stop it. Something pretty nonsensical, that’ll make sense.
That was dumb. And shit. You reconsider how much you should listen to and trust these fragmented voices. Some of them seem quite dumb. With terrible ideas.
The interfaces presented here are deliberately confusing to an extent: overloaded, corrupted, recursive, and unstable. They reflect a contemporary condition marked by acceleration, information saturation, corporate subsumption, surveillance, post-truth media, and proliferating artificial intelligence systems which have been implemented into most existing digital interfaces. Databases of personal information in computer databases across the globe.
THE BIT:
Welcome to Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow!
THE BIT:
This is sounding more gritty Channel 4 dystopian drama than satirical BBC cultural commentary.
THE PANOPTICON:
Computers don’t make errors. What they do, they do on purpose. By now, your name and particulars have been fed into every laptop, desktop, mainframe, and supermarket scanner that collectively make up the global information conspiracy, otherwise known as… the Beast. [Arlen, Texas’ leading skeptic, Dale Gribble, King of the Hill]
You are placed under surveillance, tracked, monitored and anaylysed for marketing, security and data purposes all the time – don’t you want the most appropriately targeted advertisements, since they intrude on almost every facet of contemporary existence?
These voices interrupt the central narration-
THE CARTOGRAPHER:
Not sure if this is going anywhere, but you should read about Loops of Consciousness…
…then Machine Learning, see why ChatGPT gets stuck in a “consciousness” loop when asked to display the Seahorse Emoji,
…then how and why your brain works like a Large Language Model,
..and probably after than Anti-Oedipus – oh
– and also Loops of Consciousness…
THE CARTOGRAPHER: WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU?
redirect navigation, and occasionally override user agency-
THE GRIP:
Shut up. We must push on; where are you? I’ll find you.
THE CARTOGRAPHER: YOU SHOULD LOOK AT THIS IT’S SICK LOL.
Oh my god shut the fuck up for a moment so you can produce one complete link of thinking … reflecting the instability of authorship and authority in digital environments, rapidly worsening each day.
This approach is informed by schizoanalytic thinking – particularly the rejection of unified subjectivity in favour of multiplicity, contradiction, and decentralised meaning-making – as articulated in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus.
THE ECHO:
Loops of Consciousness…
You appear be stuck in one, also.
The apparition in the interface,
doomed to think itself to ego-death.
History repeats endlessly, stagnating, and futures accelerate faster
than the promises they once held. Where are you?
[Where are you?]
Fragmentation in this work is not an aesthetic gesture but a functional response to overload: a way of thinking alongside suffocating systems rather than being absorbed by them, and at times, they are unavoidably absorbed to some extent. If you are completely overwhelmed and overloaded by bills, rent, subscription plans, mental health concerns, physical health difficulties (both of which are impacted by institutional disruption amongst socioeconomic and political turbulence), societal expectations, fear of missing out. Trade work for capital, spend the capital on living costs, repeat this cycle of degradation and exploitation until the work loses all of its integral artistic meaning and context.
The visual, sonic and textual works embedded throughout the project operate under similar principles. Paintings, photos, collages are digitised, degraded, re-encoded, written into, hex-edited, looped, and transferred across formats. Video works layer filmed material with corrupted digital artefacts, voice-over scripts, and stream-of-consciousness writing inserted directly into metadata or data structures.
These processes engage with the circulation, compression, and erosion of images in networked culture, drawing from ideas such as Hito Steyerl’s “poor image” and the loss – or mutation – of aura through reproduction and transfer. Images here are not fixed objects but unstable artefacts that accumulate and shed meaning and histories as they move through systems or mediums.
THE SYSADMIN:
These are very disparate skills and processes which require base-level understanding often through adult education learning resources. You could begin by performing a firmware update to your painting skillset. Perspective, shape, levels, anatomy, form. EXTRACTING DATA: 1000_Paintings_to_See_Before_You_Die.pdf
THE FAUX SAVANT:
Balderdash! You know how to do all of this, or at least you will by the exact time you really need to. You’ve been doing, playing, interfacing with all these things in various capacities for your entire aimless and meandering existence. “You’ll figure it out,” and not like the way you “figured out” how to cook an egg in the microwave by exploding an egg in the microwave.
THE WITNESS:
What if you just don’t want to fucking work?
THE GRIP:
Well, actually, you do have to, because what the fuck else are you going to do, kill yourself?
THE BIT:
Good one, just get a job in corporate marketing.
Did you see that? There was a guy just flashed up in view there for a second. You start inexplicably shivering. What is it like to negotiate systems that are at once familiar and hostile? How artistic practice can still function as a site of reflection, resistance, or affective intervention within systems designed to overwhelm, absorb, and neutralise critique?
There is a parallel or connecting rhizomatic concern around artistic representation and medium; what is the transcendental, masterful, ancient, embodied art of painting to the contemporary artist who lives in a world where every book and painting ever written can be datamined, reproduced and re-imagined in an instant at the small annual cost of several hundred billion litres of water; comparable to the world’s bottled water consumption, primarily via data center cooling and electricity generation.
In fact, while you’re on a roll, just over half of entire online content is artificially generated and the same percentage of online platform accounts are bots. Also, Donald Trump is the President of the United States of America which just kidnapped the President of Venezuela and endorsed the Riyadh Comedy Festival in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which is also utilising the world’s largest online content creators to fund the creation of Utopian cities built by corporations like Mercedes Benz or Coca Cola, who cares. Everything is rented. You are encouraged to optimise your personality, relationships, and emotions as if they were products. You are asked to make meaningful life decisions using information designed to manipulate you. Algorithmic systems correctly predict when you’re lonely, horny, or spiralling – and respond by selling you something or showing you worse news.
THE MYSTERY MAN:
You feel a guttural stirring in your not-un-substantial gut. You can see it all, man, in your dreams and nightmares, you’re just begging to see something you’ve never quite seen before, over and over. The backrooms, the uncanny, the impending sense of doom.
THE CARTOGRAPHER:
I love it. I love it when you get all weird with your existential spiraling. Dream-logic; Freud’s condensation and displacement amongst a narrative, where meaning emerges through affect, repetition, and symbolic drift, the way Lynch treats the unconscious not as something to decode, but something to navigate. Like in a shit website.
THE SYSADMIN:
None of this computes, really; speculation and superstition. [Higher efficiency threshold required].
THE MYSTERY MAN:
“Efficient” thinking. Ahhhhhh. You can feel your emotions being reduced only to what can be justified, measured and defended conceptually. It hurts! Anything surplus is irresponsible.
THE WITNESS:
Anything surplus is the scarce nectar which rams the soul right back into your core – free floating dread, déjà vu, jamais vu, complete and utter awe, intuition and gut feelings. Experiential rather than representational. Temporal rather than stable. Situational rather than individual. Felt before they are known. Destroyed by explanation.
THE BIT:
A fork in a world of soup.
THE PANOPTICON:
This site is monitored 24/7 even at like 3am, 365, even on Christmas and stuff, and is protected by an extensive and pricey cybersecurity programme. YOU ARE BEING WATCHED.
THE FAUX SAVANT:
You can get around this, you’ll figure it out.
Are you nearly done?
THE GRIP:
You are done.
Thank fuck for that. Anyway, painting requires downtime, as explored by Jonathan Crary in his 2013 work 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep.
Good luck, adventurer, do not worry about getting lost; you already were.
This will take you to interface 002, but feel free to ignore this.
Everything is rented.
You are encouraged to optimise your personality, relationships, and emotions as if they were products.
You are asked to make meaningful life decisions using information designed to manipulate you.
Algorithmic systems correctly predict when you’re lonely, horny, or spiralling –
and respond by selling you something
or showing you worse news.
Everything is rented
Everything is optimised
You are encouraged to optimise your personality,
your relationships,
your emotions
as if they were
products.
You are asked to make meaningful life decisions
using information
designed
to
manipulate
you.
Algorithmic systems correctly predict
when you’re lonely,
when you’re horny,
when you’re spiralling-
and respond
by selling you something
or showing you
worse
news.
Everything is rented
Everything is ren ted
Everything is lent
Everything is temporary
You are encouraged to opti mise
your perso nality
your rel ationships
your em otions
as if
they were
products
on a shelf
You are asked to make meaning ful life decisions
using informa tion
designed to manipu late you
Algorithmic systems cor rectly predict
when you’re lonely
horny
spiralling
and respond
by selling you
some thing
or showing you
worse
w o r s e
news
Everything is rented
Everything is
You are encouraged to
op ti mise
your
self
You are asked
to decide
to choose
to commit
using information
designed
to
Algorithmic systems
predict
before you do
lonely
horny
sp i r a l l ing
THE ECHO:
If I was a communist,
a rich man would
bail me
respond
sell
show
repeat
worse
news
worse
news
worse
Everything
is
rent
ed
You
are
encouraged
to
opt
—
lonely
horny
spiralling
sell
sell
sell
news
news
news.