This colourful video explores the impact of social media, and now AI, has had on our lives over the past 20 years. While also opening us up to new worlds, friends and perspectives, large tech corporations have deprivatized and parasitically co-opted our identities, relationships, art and politics. The song I wrote for this video reflects the ways we keep trying so hard to connect and be seen online because our damaged psyches have been purposefully manipulated by algorithms on sites and apps that have become increasingly addictive and detrimental to our mental health. Simultaneously the internet has opened up so much creative potential and has engendered new frameworks for art and activism. With What have we become? I play with the merging and melting of our digital selves with various caricatures and AI interpretations of womxn as Lisa Simpson. This cute, bubblegum aesthetic showing everyone glued to their devices reveals the level of distraction that hides the frightening reality of how social media has fostered the expansion of the right wing and a return to facism.
“The key element of social control is the strategy of distraction that is to divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by political and economic elites, through the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information.” ― Noam Chomsky Here we see it is our own lives being broadcast in an echo chamber that are the continuous distraction.