Social DIScontent

LOCATION

Seibu Shibuya Gallery, Tokyo

DATE:

October. 2019

Your smartphone knows more about you than anybody else… Think about it, it knows your birthday, where you live, what shoes you’ve been thinking of buying, your favourite pizza toppings, even those websites you like to visit when you think no one is looking… it knows. In many ways, it’s a pocket size proxy of yourself, a virtual twin that allows you to constantly swipe, tap and scroll your way through a never ending feed of media, far in excess of what you could possibly hope to without it. To me the thought of that capability is both exciting and daunting - and that’s exactly what I wanted to seize in this show.

Much like Frankenstein to his monster, when creating the work for Social DIScontent, I wanted to resurrect in character form, some of these “virtual selves” - deranged composites of the media that we consume on a mass scale. In parts, they often seem comfortably familiar, but in others they are plagued by malfunction and overwhelmed by information. They are the social distortions, brought to life by our insatiable appetite for pop-culture and an increasing lack of genuine face-to-face interaction that stems from our new-found devotion to smartphone simplicity. I wanted them to pose the question - how much of the content we consume makes us feel good or bad and is it even relevant? For better or for worse, this exhibition provides an opportunity to confront the data dwelling alter ego that we’ve all been harbouring in our pockets and purses.