I am a mixed-media artist challenging the confines of collage through the blending of traditional and digital mediums. My work commentates on the rapid proliferation of "brainrot" and "slop".
My practice investigates the visual culture of the current digital age. Exacerbated by the ceaseless output of readily available, commercialised, and short-form digital content, the disconnect towards nature and naturally produced phenomena becomes ever the more drastic. Through digital and traditional collage, video editing and sound mixing, I try to replicate the feeling of a monkey in perpetual fight or flight mode, being confronted with its utter loss of autonomy in a technological dictatorship. My Degree Show installation presents itself as a large screen akin to a Big Brother broadcast from 1984 continuously streaming a demented aggregate of content. It is a piece of satire rooted in hopelessness and uncertainty for the future.
Drawing from my own experiences online, I aim to construct a simulacrum of the Internet, particularly focusing on the short-form content and the shady undercurrent of reactionary politics. The release of the Epstein files added fuel to my frustration, and I wish to emphasise the hostility and fragmentation of cyberspace. My feelings were reinforced by my visit to Dafen Village in Shenzhen, where replicas of famous paintings and AI-generated images are mass-produced. With the deconstruction and recomposition (regurgitation) of my own collage work plus sourced images, I imitate an AI program, spewing out a mess of unrecognisable pixels, harsh unmelodic noise, bright shifting colours, largely inspired by the sporadic and discombobulated nature of improvised jazz and YTPs. Subliminal messages are sprinkled throughout the film to add an extra layer of insidiousness, as if it were alive.
Monkeys and apes can be found all throughout my work. Besides being my favourite animals, I am continually impressed by their intelligence and similarity to humans. To me, they symbolise a sense of playful innocence that humans have lost through the process of evolution and civilisation. They serve as parallels to the technology-addled human and the strong aversion to intellect some exhibit online.
In the time leading up to my final project I have mostly worked on flat, traditional mediums. Inspired by the Pop Art movement, I mainly worked with recognisable and replicable ‘mascot’ imagery accompanied by vivid colours and patterns. I would then cut up and splice them together into grid-like configurations. After some editing in Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro, the results of my experimentation would be presented in my final film. By converting them into sound using a special program, this marriage of noise and recombined imagery brings a new meaning to ‘collage’.
WARNING: Language used in the below video may cause offense.
WARNING: Video may trigger those sensitive to light/flashing colours.