I hope that for some of you, it is obvious that this work is inspired by the incredible Hannah Hoch and her collage

Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany" (1919–20)

(scroll down for more info on her artwork)

Alongside the Hannah Hoch reference hidden within the collage, there's also a reference to another artist, Barbara Kruger, on one of the phone screens. Whilst I was making this, I was thinking about how we can learn from those who have thought and created and fought for a better world before us. To give us a sense of hope that we too are capable of doing the same.

The background in the top right corner is a screenshot taken from the painting The Creation of Adam (The Creation of Man) by Michelangelo. Here I was thinking about how religion/history, and the interpretation of it, lives in the background of the world we're experiencing today, woven through art and culture to form the society we find ourselves in.

I've been studying Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, which is a fascinating text, especially given he wrote it back in 1967 long before the internet, phones, social media and algorithms. I find it more and more difficult to be on social media platforms, where as I scroll I'm fed images of the worst kind of human atrocities, alongside influencers selling lifestyle hacks and ridiculous AI memes generated by the president of the United States. I sometimes fear we're becoming numb to all the heinous things that are somehow allowed to happen in the world. Partly through being desensitised to it all through the media we consume and partly due to feeling a bit hopeless when those with power seemingly get to play God with zero accountability. And perhaps because we're all so caught up in being on our phones and in the endless cycle of production (work) and consumption (buying stuff and consuming media) that we forget to step away and try and create whatever space we can, to remember that we all get to contribute to the world, the real world, that we actually get to live in and experience.

I have to keep reminding myself, that we all get to choose what and who we support, where to spend our time and money, who to vote for, and collectively make enough noise that those in power loose their control. I realised that I have to stop sleepwalking in the algorithmic slop bucket of my feed and take back control of my time, mind, the life I want to have and the person I want to be.

I've been questioning how much information we take in, that we're not even aware of. I've read that psychologically if we see the same thing enough time our brains believe it to be true. It allows our brains to be more efficient, leaving more brainpower for other things what require more consideration. In the past, I guess hearing the same thing several times probably did mean there was a high chance of it being true or at least somewhat accurate. However, in the age of AI content, featuring AI generated humans, literally speaking the same script in different bodies, we're at risk of hearing the same slop several times, and given we're mostly scrolling with our critical minds switched off, how much of it are our brains picking up as truth without even questioning it?

Which links to the idea in marketing psychology that we need to see a brand/product 7 times before we even notice it. So what happens the other 6 times? If our brain knows to recognise it the 7th time it must be keeping a record, keeping score, of the previous 6, and if we're not consciously aware of it where must it be going? The subconscious? I dread to think what must be in there from all the endless scrolling. I can scroll and not remember a single thing I saw/watched 5 minutes later. But is it all lurking in my subconscious? Building it's own views and beliefs I've never consciously had chance to question because my conscious mind has never even noticed it slipping in there? Given what slop and nonsense is circulating online that's a pretty terrifying thought.

I try hard to curate my feed and click "not interesting" to filter out as much as I can. But sometimes I just scroll past. I think how many young minds are scrolling past feeds full of tech-bro-red-pill-AI-slop as my daughter is getting to an age of wanting a phone... and the that thought too is terrifying.

So this work is me taking the world I see online and trying to make it more physical and real to try and make sense of it. To piece together all the fragments that swim in and out of my feed and my mind. Obviously, it's not everything, because everything would be too much to fit in this 114x90cm creation, we'd need a phone for that! But that's sort of the point. There's too much to process, too much to physically contain and hold in our realities. So this is a collection of all the things I could recall, from the endless silo of my feed, from my particular corner of the internet.

Yes it's bleak, yes there's hope, and yes it's a complete headfuck.

I guess what I wanted to show in the bottom quadrants of this piece is that we are not powerless or hopeless. A handful of men have just led us to believe we are.