Blog for Dr. Tony D Sampson (academic, author)
Tag: Are We All Addicts Now?
This topic has been getting a lot of TV/Press coverage here in the UK.
Here’s a video of a symposium discussing artistic resistance, critical theory strategies to ‘internet addiction’ and the book Are We All Addicts Now? Convened at Central St Martins, London on 7th Nov 2017. Introduced by Ruth Catlow with talks by Katriona Beales, Feral Practice, Emily Rosamond and myself…
@KatrionaBeales@FeralPractice@TonyDSpamson & @EmilyRosamond @furtherfield
Two videos of the Are We All Addicts Now? Book Launch and Symposium at Central St Martins are now available. You can see a full recording of all the speakers featured on Vimeo.
Follow this link:
https://vimeo.com/album/4985471
Some rather animated images from my talk at Central St Martins last night. This really was an interesting series of talks that made evident a concerning link between addiction and digital capitalism, and explored the potential for resistance from a wide variety of perspectives (philosophy, art and science). A more affirmative, yet critical example of interdisciplinarity interferences than those that simply tick the pervasive neoliberal agendas of impact and productivity. There’s a video on its way too – via the Furtherfield website.
The exhibition and research project Are We All Addicts Now? explores the seductive and addictive qualities of the digital. Artist Katriona Beales’ work addresses the sensual and tactile conditions of her life lived online: the saturated colour and meditative allure of glowing screens, the addictive potential of infinite scroll and notification streams. Her new body of work for AWAAN re-imagines the private spaces in which we play out our digital existence. The exhibition includes glass sculptures containing embedded screens, moving image works and digitally printed textiles. Beales’ work is complemented by a new sound-art work by artist and curator Fiona MacDonald : Feral Practice.
Beales celebrates the sensuality and appeal of online spaces, but criticises how our interactions get channeled through platforms designed to be addictive – how corporations use various ‘gamification’ and ‘neuro-marketing’ techniques to keep the ‘user’ on-device, to drive endless circulation, and monetise our every click. She suggests that in succumbing to online behavioural norms we emerge as ‘perfect capitalist subjects’.
For Furtherfield, Beales has constructed a sunken ‘bed’ into which visitors are invited to climb, where a glowing glass orb flutters with virtual moths repeatedly bashing the edges of an embedded screen. A video installation, reminiscent of a fruit machine, displays a drum of hypnotically spinning images whose rotation is triggered by the movement of gallery visitors. Beales recreates the peculiar, sometimes disquieting, image clashes experienced during her insomniac journeys through endless online picture streams – beauty products lining up with death; naked cats with armed police.
Glass-topped tables support the amorphous curves of heavy glass sculptures, which refract the multi-coloured light of tiny screens hidden inside. Visualisations of eye-tracking data (harvested live from gallery visitors) scatter across the ceiling. On the exterior wall of the gallery, an LED scrolling sign displays text Beales’ has compiled, based on comments from online forums about internet addiction.
Where Beales addresses the near-inescapability of machine-driven connection, Feral Practice draws us into the networks in nature. Mycorrhizal Meditation is a sound-art work for free download, accessed via posters in Furtherfield Gallery and across Finsbury Park. MM takes the form of a guided meditation, journeying through the human body and down into the ‘underworld’ of living soil, with its mycorrhizal network formed of plant roots and fungal threads. It combines spoken word and sound recordings of movement and rhythm made in wooded places. Feral Practice complicates the idea of nature as ‘ultimate digital detox’, and alerts us to the startling interconnectivity of beyond-human nature, the ‘wood-wide-web’ that pre-dates our digital connectivity by millennia.
See full programme: http://furtherfield.org/programmes/exhibition/are-we-all-addicts-now
I’m also taking part in the Are We All Addicts Now? symposium at Central St Martins (University of the Arts London) in collaboration with London Laser. The date for this event is yet to be fully confirmed, but likely to be at 6.30pm on Tuesday 7 November.
The book is published by Liverpool University Press: https://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/products/100809
It’s part of an amazing looking exhibit at Furtherfield Gallery in London between 16 September – 12 November 2017: http://furtherfield.org/programmes/exhibition/are-we-all-addicts-now
Here’s the blurb
Are We All Addicts Now? Digital Dependence is an artist-led enquiry by Katriona Beales into digital hyper-connectivity and the normalization of addictive behaviours through our everyday interactions with digital devices. While internet addiction is not yet considered an official psychiatric disorder, it is gaining increased recognition as a behavioral phenomenon in both scientific study and the popular press. This project is the first interdisciplinary exploration of this burgeoning diagnostic territory. The book combines visual and textual research, including artistic works from Katriona Beales and Fiona MacDonald : Feral Practice, alongside essays from contributors in the fields of anthropology, digital culture, psychology and philosophy. Informed by the latest scientific research, the book acknowledges the increasing difficulty many people experience in controlling their online habits. At the same time, it also thinks beyond the biological model of internet addiction toward the social and political dimensions that shape everyday online activities and habit-forming behaviour. This book is co-edited by curator Vanessa Bartlett and medical doctor and neuroscience researcher Henrietta Bowden-Jones. It is published to coincide with a major exhibition of new artwork by Katriona Beales at Furtherfield, London.
The below text is taken from Vanessa Bartlett’s blog.
For the past two years I have been working in collaboration with artist Katriona Beales on her Welcome Trust funded project Are We All Addicts Now? The project developed off the back of her 2015 work White Matter, which I commissioned as part of my Group Therapy exhibition with FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology). The project will culminate in a major exhibition of new artwork by Katriona at Furtherfield, London this September.
Are We All Addicts Now? is an artist-led enquiry into digital hyper-connectivity and the normalization of addictive behaviours through our everyday interactions with digital devices. While internet addiction is not yet considered an official psychiatric disorder, it is gaining increased recognition as a behavioral phenomenon in both scientific study and the press.
I have edited the Are We All Addicts Now? book in collaboration with medical doctor and neuroscience researcher Henrietta Bowden-Jones. It combines visual and textual research, including artistic works from Katriona, alongside essays from contributors in the fields of anthropology, digital culture, psychology and philosophy. Informed by the latest scientific research, the book acknowledges the increasing difficulty many people experience in controlling their online habits. At the same time, it also thinks beyond the biological model of internet addiction toward the social and political dimensions that shape everyday online activities and habit-forming behaviour. This book is the first interdisciplinary exploration of this burgeoning diagnostic territory.
The book also features some amazing visuals by designer Stëfan Schäfer (see featured image).
List of contributors:
Katriona Beales
Ruth Catlow
Mark D. Griffiths with Daria J. Kuss & Halley M. Pontes
Fiona MacDonald : Feral Practice
Gerald Moore
Emily Rosamond
Tony Sampson
Theodora Sutton
It’s due to be published on 15 September and is available from the Liverpool University Press website
Very pleased to confirm that I’ll be speaking at Central Saint Martins (University of the Arts, London) in early November (date tbc) at a special public symposium to discuss a new book called Are We All Addicts Now? (Liverpool University Press, Sept 2017). The book is co-edited by Vanessa Bartlett and Henrietta Bowden-Jones and designed by Stëfan Schäfer and it sounds wonderful (chiming very well with themes discussed in my latest book, The Assemblage Brain). For example, the work looks at emergent pathologies such as internet addiction as “symptomatic” of a “new human environment.”
As well as contextualizing “internet addiction” Are We All Addicts Now? is “part art book, part quasi self-help manual,” It encourages self-reflection, but is explicitly “not therapy.” 🙂
There’s also going to be an exhibit and launch at Furtherfield Gallery in London in September.
My talk will probably be titled “Tap My Head and Mike My Brain: Neuromarketing and Addiction” – the title of my short chapter in the book and a title borrowed from Jussi Parikka’s reference to Pynchon in his blurb for The Assemblage Brain.
VIRALITY 