♥♥ Relaxing Video of Tropical Beach with Blue Sky White Sand and Palm Tree (White Noise, 1985)

For the last year or so, I’ve found myself investigating ways to express the feeling of supersaturation I’m confronted with when online, or off. I Can’t Even process the amount of data flooding my photoreceptors every millisecond, never mind all the books I told my friend I would get on Amazon and read last summer, or the “feed” that’s inviting itself into my life.

♥ ♥ Relaxing Video of Tropical Beach with Blue Sky White Sand and Palm Tree (White Noise, 1985) is an exercise in accepting the mass, the bulk, the superabundance, and letting it wash over you. In the abstract mass of possible Google queries, I searched for solace, a respite, a way to receive data and all at once understand that I was receiving, taking on a load, a labor. I Can’t Even keep up with internet culture, its own genre of brand, aesthetic. Is there a problem when the guy who can explain every meme still feels lost in the undertow? Does YouTube’s autosuggest keep me trapped in the surface tension of the universal archive like a waterstrider unable to drown itself? The choice of dated cultural touchstones is intentional; Skype before Microsoft threw it on the backburner, Superbowl mascots from 2015, a gif of a flip-phone that couldn’t share gifs, ripped audio from self-soother iPhone apps, etc. etc. And not for the valuable cache of the ‘uncool,’ but as the last call of a digital native doing his best to keep up! The landscape is everchanging, like a slow erosion that leaves you standing unsteadily on the beach.

• Written for the exhibition I Can't Even in 2018.