We are all content consumers. Information is becoming a drug. Images and representations acquire an increasingly important role and their overload wears out our self-control. Our smart devices provide us with seemingly undemanding and accelerated pathways to content, keeping us busy and absorbed. We don’t seem able to avoid or free ourselves from consumption. Addiction shapes segregation. We are alone while being surrounded by people. We are absent, unable to discipline ourselves. The use of social media changes our sense of distance and proximity. Attached to our gadgets we manage to isolate when in the company of others, fashioning an ecosystem only for us and our object of affection.
But what defines this domain that we sink into? We migrate to a habitat of persistent stimulation, constantly fed with the dizzying speed of images. Trouble-free access to content makes us become lost in the act of expenditure. We are motivated to be engaged with a continuous supply of visuals so as to escape from boredom. Stop consuming and a notification will remind you to jump in again. A screen persistently demands your focus, reminding to devour more and more. Entertainment in containment. A battle of unrestrained freedom and (un)conscious imprisonment interferes with our awareness of bodily presence.
Technology enables us to associate and connect across the globe but in a data-driven world. Internet introduces radical new perspectives of the cosmos. The immaterial against the material. We operate daily mediated by the artificial. How can we communicate in a fast-paced era where everything triggers us to be involved with content? Can we put aside our desire to consume and replace it with life? Can we command ourselves? Can we ignore binary codes and be liberated from their consumption?
Details that stimulate us are dispersed through our personal contraptions, while uncontrolled content absorbing allows companies pinpoint our preferences, shape choice and judgement. Stimuli affluence attacks ‘compos mentis’, increasing inability to think or pay attention. As the meaning stems from the way we deal with the particulars, the dynamics of interaction between individuals and mass media are crucial for their power and potential in reformulating approximations to actuality.
The topic of “Content Addiction” is treated as an experiment on how we treat exposure to constant stimuli overcharge. Reflecting on contemporary challenges of electronic connectivity, work identifies links among communication technologies and their impact to society and thought regulating. Witnessing social proof reshapes our perspective about standards and purpose, greatly impacting on customer behavior and habitual patterns. Exploring motifs in percipience while applying the concepts of behavioral psychology influences and directs predefined responses, exploiting our need to connect, disseminate and absorb.
The rapid pace clashes on the limited capacity of our mental recourses, strengthening the role of subconscious influence in decision making. Due to cognitive overload, abundance and easy access to information loosens critical engagement and expectations for content quality, playing with the emotional feedback of the recipient. Rationality can be impaired. Since attentiveness functions within limits, we are all prospective impulse byers and the product can be an imposed condition.
Ceaseless stimulation takes advantage of technological trends, while simplification and acceleration of the communication overloads ourselves mentally. Visuals and data are relentlessly reconfigured and distributed, following cycles of repetition, questioning our standpoint and dependence of opinion forming. While investing our social capital into community platforms, the relationship between globalized and personal interweaves the spheres of what is considered public and private.
The illusion of collective interconnectivity in the digital world leads to the indirect consuming of progressively additional material, hindering our ability to identify the difference between manufactured and actual. Dealing with the subject of isolation resulting from addictive attitudes, work examines how our bond to a device can replace face-to-face interaction. Project develops as a series of artefacts made in direct contiguity with my body and media tools. A way of mapping the interplay symbolises the strong authority of information that alters and interferes with comprehension. Imprinted with marks of own bodily registration and actions, these performance-based sculptures negotiate the relationship of corporeal and digital worlds, while recognising the symbiotic association that forms a contemporary hybrid, obstructing social connection. Physical embodiments of the interrelationship convert process to tangible objects, representative of their strength to dominate and manipulate perception. Increasingly separated from human contact, such devices describe extensions and limitations of the physical body.
Blending elements into unique alchemies by investigating the technique of spatial-generation through the re-composition, work questions political and societal conventions, while considering the propaganda forces related to media control. Challenging the perceived, the project is commenting on individual consciousness, initiating a connection between what is tangible and intangible. My intention is to bring viewers to confronting their relation to technology and evaluate the considerable affective potential it has on shaping an alternative reality, thinking about present-day challenges of electronic communication and connectivity.