A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he’d taken and the corners he cut… and he’d still see the matrix in his dreams, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colourless void….
He’d lived for so long on a constant edge of anxiety that he’d almost forgotten what real fear was.
With the destruction of the Digital Commons in 2016, the internet was no longer the place I knew from my teenage years. The mass utopian vision warped into a collective scream as I slept on the edge of my bed every night, endlessly scrolling.
The mental environment is saturated by signs that create a sort of continuous excitation, a permanent electrocution, which leads the individual mind as well as the collective mind to a state of collapse.
My depression and anxiety became constant reminders of how toxic everything had become, four years of algorithmic vitriol, and the psychological toll it took. The online world had become real, and terrible.
It may be that after months of constant online connectivity, people will come out of their houses and apartments looking for conjunction. A movement of solidarity and tenderness might arise, leading people toward an emancipation from connective dictatorship.
The terrain of tomorrow is chromakey green.
I have lived on the internet for the past 20 years. I draw on my long personal history online by resurrecting the visual tropes of old and humorously reimaginging them through new images and software. My influences include Robert Rauschenberg, Hito Steyerl, and Seth Price. The audience for my work is transnational, consisting of internet-dwellers and other extremely online individuals engaged in image-rich forms of communication.
I am based in Houston. I received my MFA in Painting from the University of Houston in 2014.
