Mammalian Dive Reflex

Installation
Akademirommet, Oslo, November 2017
with gratitude to explosm.net, sigilscribe.me, elsewhere.org, and inspirobot.me for allowing me the use of their online content generators and HM Surf for music.

“Grasping for safe metanarratives in an era of ontological collapse is a fool’s errand. If you’re thirsty you’re just going to have to get used to drinking from Azathoth’s firehose.”
― Gordon White, Whisky Rant: Disc 2 (Special Features), runesoup.com

Four websites, one projected on each wall. Each site contains a different “automatic content generator”, a mechanism that produces a new image or text every time the page is refreshed. All four are updated simultaneously, and left for only a moment before they’re replaced by the next iteration. Four automatically generated soundcloud playlists from four small speakers create a complementary cacophony.

The expression FOMO (short for ‘Fear Of Missing Out’) was coined in 2004. As a disease it preys on our modern attention-based economy. It’s impossible to experience everything, particularly when this “everything” spawns from a near infinite amount of available permutations. No longer needed in the process are such speed-limiting intermediaries as human intervention.

This isn’t necessary:

“But even if such a prediction were true, our inability to distinguish between a virtual reality simulation and the real world will have less to do with the increasing fidelity of simulation than the decreasing perceptual abilities of us humans.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age

Mammalian Dive Reflex

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