For the culmination of the associate artist programme at Devonshire Collective, we presented this workshop at VOLT gallery in response to Miguel Martin’s exhibition Up and Down.
doom scroll invited guests to waste time on the internet with us - surfing the web aimlessly while others watched on a projected screen and responded through surrealist writing techniques and conversation.
At Toad Lickers Collective, we see the internet as a transcendent space for creativity, collaboration and even as a great leveller, bringing information, opportunity and entertainment to a global population, no matter their background or status.
We also see that the internet is not currently fulfilling this potential. Centralised systems of control through major tech companies, polluted algorithms and infectious paywall structures reflect the state of a ‘real’ world dominated by an outdated hierarchical system. Rather than being a space for play and connection, the internet has become a new and abstract workspace, obsessed with enforcing ‘the grindset’.
Our aim through this workshop was to spark conversation around better use of online technology, considering its corruption by corporate tech companies. We are exhausted by rhetoric that insists online technologies themselves - offering new ways of learning, thinking and communicating - are to blame for the deterioration of contemporary and future generations. But we are also weary from the doom scroll, and searching for new ways to engage with the endless information at our fingertips.
We were inspired by Kenneth Goldsmith’s book, Wasting Time on the Internet, which forefronts the positive nature of the internet as a fractured but exciting new way of communicating and a surreal or ‘stuplime’ platform for creativity. Somewhere between stupid and sublime, the internet could link us across the world, enabling us to share resources and collaborate peer to peer in a creative way. Or it could be our downfall, generating a species of zombies born of the omniscient ‘work-core’ virus, evolved to do nothing but grind and consume.
