if i’m being honest, or something inbetween
This body of work comes out of my time spent living online. It comes from mindlessly scrolling through social media. It comes from my fascination with online shopping. It comes from being one voice in a sea of billions. It comes from my fears around constantly being visible. From my anxieties about our future. It comes from binge watching HBO Max all day. It comes from being made incessantly aware of issues bigger than myself that I can do nothing about. It comes from feeling powerless. It comes from a desire to prove I exist. That I did something today. It comes from what it feels like to live both physically and virtually.
I can’t help but feel like I am always somewhere, someplace in between two things. There’s something about being alive right now that feels like both an end and a beginning. It’s challenging to put that feeling into words, but that is what this exhibition is about.
This exhibition is about what it feels like to live in between: to live between and within both the virtual and the physical world. It’s about what it feels like to maintain multiple personas, consume content, embrace fictions, and experience a total loss of context as we navigate our lives both online and in real life. But even that phrase “in real life” is flawed because at this point our virtual lives are real life. The space in between is closing. There appears to be less and less separation between these worlds as they are becoming increasingly more reliant on one another to exist. Even when we “unplug” the world we experience, and our perception of that world has been so heavily changed, altered by the virtual that there is little difference. This exhibition contemplates the consequences of this bleeding between the virtual and the physical, and explores its beauty, its failures, and its contradictions.
Byung-Chul Han states in his book, Undinge, “Today we chase after information, without gaining knowledge. We take note of everything, without gaining insight. We communicate constantly, without participating in a community. We save masses of data, without keeping track of memories. We accumulate friends and followers, without encountering others. This is how information develops a lifeform: inexistant and impermanent.”
There is an infinite amount of data that describes, and details nearly every moment of my life, yet I feel just that- inexistant and impermanent. But we were never meant to be permanent. And maybe the reality of the situation is that we are more permanent now than we’ve ever been.