SLOW DEATH MARCH TOWARD TOTAL EXTINCTION (2024)
marshall mcluhan understood technology as expanding our physical abilities during the industrial age, and in the electronic age as expanding our central nervous system. information technology thus has allowed us to expand our consiousness on to a secondary plane of digitality where we rely ever more on devices to carry out basic functions; why commit something to memory when it’s a google search away ?
none of this is new, and phones arent the problem, however, digitized social reproduction in the hands of private enterprise has been weaponized to induce a cultural “flattening” through rapid sign cycling, mediated and monetized by our techno-feudal gods wherein all definitions are commutable—every virtual facet of culture macerated by the algo and spat back out; stage four simulacra type shit.
this lecture by mark fisher describes this flattening in more detail, in the context of music in britan in the 2000’s.
with this project i wanted to reify this concept of “flattening“ and digitized social reproduction by enclosing the viewer in a space that reinforces these concepts through the use of a primary source—as an over active user of the internet from a young age, every facet of my life and my experiences has been mediated through the machinations of information technology and fed through algorithms twice over.