LUDDITE BY DESIGN
Luddite by design is what it means to be human, An escape from the techno-Neo liberal-nihilism of the 21th century. Why is it that we wish to mine the last asset of the of the natural world? Was it not enough to burn the coal, cut down the trees and get fat on consumption society? Now with everything having been comodified in the external realm the venture capitalists chose to look within and begin to mine minds. TikTok and others now quantify the abuse of psychology.
This project is my attempt of undoing this phenomenon and entering into the speculative. A future where people reagin control and break the loom of the Neo liberal.
A talk through of my project, how it came to be and where it sits in our world.
This is the film displayed within my final outcome, contextualising my piece.
CONTEXT REPORT EXTRACT
'The implication and application of the theory is in fact laying out a methodology for the integration of internet addiction within the framework of social media and a structural model for modern websites/apps more generally. An example of this being; the prompt being the notification to a friend posting a photo of themselves, the motivation being the attachment you have to that person and the ability to open the app being as easy as the tap of a screen. This is the first step however, the subversion being from what he calls ‘habits’ to an addiction, a positive to a negative. For when you are in the app you are then engaged, learning the addiction ‘habit’. The first time you might have a quick scroll through other people’s posts before returning to whatever you might have previously been doing for example. Basically, after I... I will... the action method he argues is the most affective as you are already in the process of an action and are therefore less likely to put off the task. The task being scrolling until a new behaviour must be undertaken out of necessity. As consequence of the addiction caused by the process outlined, the implication inevitably is that the ability-motivation relationship in regards to alternative actions/tasks become far less appealing comparatively to the next click or touch. So, with repeated interaction and the addictive nature of the social media platform it becomes more and more normal to fill time with these services and then eventually begin to actively make time for them. Prompts now observed commonly are as broad as social anxiety, procrastination, distraction, education,
being happy, being sad, feeling empathetic... they have become categorisable by many of the things that make us human. This is a total monopolisation of emotion and a leaching of the instinct to feel connected. The real-world implications of this could be seen in areas such as dating, shopping, friendship, working environments, creativity all being wrapped up into a format so easy to digest and create within that it becomes comparatively trivial to the real- world event you are emulating.'
PHYSICAL MANIFESTATION
As part of our third year we were given the opportunity to present our final projects in the Copeland Gallery space as a final years show and celebration. I took the opportunity as I often do to make the most of my construction skills and create an object that would be representative of the many throughout the years progression. In doing so the object would become a teaching tool, taking inspiration from the documentary work of Adam Curtis and Simon Amstel and also combing it with my own design, videography/ cinematography sensibilities. Knowing that this is not all I wanted to say with the piece the object that surrounds and becomes the communicator of that narrative would have to be equally relevant the themes conveyed audio visually. With this in mind I created a loom as reference to the luddites who would break the machines that were taking their jobs in the early part of the 19th century, a screen that could only been seen when combined with glasses made using the polarisation lens from that same screen, representative of the isolation that technology creates, all with the intention of breaking the psychological manipulation that comes along with our 21st century devices.
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