anxiety

In Far inside, the visitor experiences life with schizophrenia. In this spatial experience you feel the lost of control on reality. The original interviews with Ton are the red line in this installation to give an impression of reality through his eyes. Writer Karin Anema describes how Ton battles his psychoses to get his life together in her book ‘ Today I will buy all colours’.

“Doomscrolling” refers to the ways in which people find themselves regularly—and in some cases, almost involuntarily—scrolling bad news headlines on their phone, often for hours each night in bed when they had meant to be sleeping. Certainly the realities of the pandemic necessitate a level of vigilance for the purposes of personal safety. But doomscrolling isn’t just a natural reaction to the news of the day—it’s the result of a perfect yet evil marriage between a populace stuck online, social media interfaces designed to game and hold our attention, and the realities of an existential global crisis. Yes, it may be hard to look away from bad news in any format, but it’s nearly impossible to avert our eyes when that news is endlessly presented via designed-to-be-addictive social media interfaces that know just what to show us next in order to keep us “engaged.” As an alternative interface, The Endless Doomscroller acts as a lens on our software-enabled collective descent into despair. By distilling the news and social media sites down to their barest most generalized messages and interface conventions, The Endless Doomscroller shows us the mechanism that’s behind our scroll-induced anxiety: interfaces—and corporations—that always want more. More doom (bad news headlines) compels more engagement (via continued liking/sharing/posting) which produces more personal data, thus making possible ever more profit. By stripping away the specifics wrapped up in each headline and minimizing the mechanics behind most interface patterns, The Endless Doomscroller offers up an opportunity for mindfulness about how we’re spending our time online and about who most benefits from our late night scroll sessions. And, if one scrolls as endlessly as the work makes possible, The Endless Doomscroller might even enable a sort of exposure or substitution therapy, a way to escape or replace what these interfaces want from and do to us. In other words, perhaps the only way out of too much doomscrolling is endless doomscrolling.

(Source: Author's description)

"The Executor" was written in an unusual way. Each author took turns writing sentences, beginning with the final sentence of the story and working backwards.

In a release from Spineless Books, Montfort and Gillespie state that "without planning the content of the story, [they] alternated writing sentences" (Montfort). Each author contributed sentences without knowing the direction that the narrative would take.

The plot follows Jeremy Salader, who returns to a past he has left behind. At some point in his life he made the decision to escape from his life and move towards a new future. A phone call forces Salader to return to his home. By simply looking through the phonebook, Jeremy realizes that his sister, Selma, is still living in the family home caring for their dying mother. When Jeremy meets with Selma, Jeremy's attachment to his estranged mother becomes clear. Selma feels that Jeremy and his mother need to reconcile because she can no longer deal with a dying parent alone. No decision is made and both siblings are left contemplating the future.

"The Executor," built on both processing, an open source programming language and environment for the creation of images, animation and interactions, as well as Java. The story is presented as a scrolling text with the speed of the scrolling gradually increasing as the story progresses. The screen gradually darkens, from white to black, and the text pulses as the story unfolds. The pulsing, and breathing of the text describes the collaborative nature of the work. It mirrors the back and forth process of writing the authors used to write the story. The visual elements also convey Jeremy's growing anxiety about seeing his mother and the mother's progression towards death. The reversible chronology of "The Executor" formally suggests that the past is not distinct from the future: the two intertwine and act upon each other in social, psychological, and narrative systems alike.

(Source: Electronic Literature Directory entry by Jonathan Jarvie)

Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot, re-mediated for Web. In this project different parts of the play are appropriated for cyberspace. to examine different themes including: hyperlinked narration in cyberspace, experience of reading mediated by information retrieval tools, collaboratively generated content and conformism, our desires and anxieties in cyberspace and the temporal experience across different media. (source: http://sepans.com/sp/works/waiting-for-gwodo/)