My current work is focused on digital image cultures and how mediated imagery is performed in ways that alter memory and the self. This exploration has led me to examine the tension between false and “authentic” memory, questioning the possibility of a true authentic self in the networked age. Often utilising my own harvested data taken from my Google archive as source inspiration, my investigations into the authentic self in a networked age has also made me question the role which multinational technology companies play in altering the way in which we perceive the self. With the amount of time spent consuming images in virtual, networked environments, these images have ways of permeating reality: becoming re-performed and thereby realer then reality itself.
Along with exploring these tensions in the contemporary production of subjectivity, I am also interested in how the death drive, through a compulsive need to be constantly faced with yourself, could be associated with the internet and how we use the Web. Specifically how self-obsession with oblivion becomes heightened and a collective activity online.
This also calls into the question the way in with networked loops function online, often blinding users to themselves through the use of targeted advertising allowing them to ultimately consume themselves.
I often use myself as a device to explore these issues, whether performative or through digital collage and video, as a way to understand the affective space of these topics and to raise questions surrounding them. The ambiguity of not answering whether something is true or false is important in allowing the work to become open to interpretation.
