In 2018, while studying moving image at Ilam School of Fine Arts, I created Signify, an experimental installation exploring repetition, mediated experience and the increasingly blurred boundary between the real and the artificial.
At the time, I was experiencing a difficult period with my mental health. I was also becoming increasingly aware of how digital media, particularly Instagram, was influencing my attention, behaviour and relationship with everyday life.
I found myself endlessly scrolling through an artificial world of colour, excitement, repetition and carefully constructed identities. Influencer culture was becoming increasingly prominent, and I was fascinated by how people with little more than an ability to attract attention could become influential figures in popular culture.
There was something hypnotic about it. The constant stimulation made ordinary life seem increasingly grey and uninteresting. I could feel myself becoming disconnected from the simplicity and wonder of everyday experience.
I didn’t yet have the language to fully articulate what I was experiencing, but I knew something was changing. I was becoming addicted to distracting myself from my own life, diverting my attention towards an augmented digital version of myself. One that offered opinions as facts, carefully selected highlights suggesting my life was better than others, and an endlessly more exciting and successful version of everything. Fighting a relentless battle of engineered engagement with more of my time at strangers. Ridiculous really.
My earlier work, What Is Real (2011–2017), explored many of these same ideas.
During this period, I became interested in the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard and his concept of hyperreality, where representations and simulations can become more influential than the realities they supposedly represent.
Hyperreality describes a condition in which the distinction between actual reality and its simulation becomes increasingly difficult to recognise.
This became central to Signify. I was interested in how digital signs, images and messages could communicate urgency, importance or relevance independently of their truth. Through constant repetition, these mediated symbols could begin to feel more immediate and meaningful than lived experience itself.
I was also becoming increasingly interested in the work of Nam June Paik, particularly his experimental use of television monitors, electronic imagery and video installations. His approach to technology as an artistic medium was hugely influential and remains so today.
Signify emerged from these influences and my own experiences. It wasn’t conceived as an intellectual critique of social media, but as a personal expression of what it felt like to become absorbed in a world of artificial stimulation.
The installation was constructed using discarded iMacs and older CRT monitors that had been sitting in storage at the School of Fine Arts. It was a rare opportunity to work with so many screens and build something that physically represented the environment I was experiencing.
I created the moving imagery in iMovie, manually loading and looping the individual sequences across the computers. Coloured lighting added another layer to the installation.
The imagery drew upon familiar signs, popular culture, advertising and symbolic messages, often disconnected from their original context. Repeated across multiple screens, these fragments created an environment in which meaning was continually suggested, reinforced and distorted.
The soundtrack was equally involved. I took a piece of music, cut it into hundreds of individual notes and reconstructed them across a timeline, creating a repetitive, hypnotic and increasingly relentless audio experience.
Together, the moving images and fragmented soundtrack were intended to create an immersive experience of sensory overload, where repetition and emotional cues became more powerful than the individual messages themselves.
The finished installation was filmed using a Canon DSLR. For the opening sequence, we mounted the camera on a skateboard and pulled it backwards using a piece of string attached with tape. A wonderfully simple solution that produced exactly the movement I wanted.
A few fellow students helped with the production, and Lara’s involvement was particularly important. Her presence gave the work a human and natural counterpoint to the artificial environment.
Nature has always been a grounding influence in my life. Within Signify, it represented something beyond the noise, repetition and constructed realities of the digital world.
I’ve often been asked about the meaning of the ending. I’ve generally preferred to leave that open to interpretation, although Lara’s presence has always represented something deeply personal to me: Mother Earth, and a return to the natural world.
Looking back at Signify eight years later is an unusual experience. Much of what I was feeling in 2018 now seems remarkably relevant to the world we inhabit in 2026. The constant production of content, artificial identities, repetition and competition for attention have become increasingly embedded in everyday life.
It’s the feeling that entire aspects of contemporary culture have become uncanny. Politics, celebrity, advertising, news, even the way people present themselves. And the interesting part is that these things aren’t necessarily fake. The events are real. The people are real. The suffering is real. But the way everything is packaged, amplified, commercialised and distributed digitally can make reality itself feel strangely artificial. Hyperreal.
What interests me most is that I was responding to these changes before I could properly explain them. The work was an expression of my lived experience. A reflection of the noise that was suffocating me.
My own relationship with digital media has changed considerably since then. I still use Instagram occasionally to share every day moments, some photographs and updates to my work, but I no longer scroll or follow the endless stream of content. It took another 2 years, beyond the lockdowns, for me to finally pull free and find some balance. I remember the moment when I knew it was over, much like those defining moments of sobriety are.
Now, like quitting any harmful addiction, I have no desire to go back. Reality is far more beautiful and brutal, but better than a simulation, for me anyway. I find myself more present within it once again. I’m not wanting entanglement with popular media and hyperreal culture at all that now resembles no more than a grotesque horror movie served as entertainment. Utterly repulsive.
But with modern life increasingly revolving around screens, algorithms and artificial intelligence, I’m not immune to their allure or promises. I still have to tread carefully. Right now, I feel I’ve found a reasonable balance, but it’s a fine line. To observe and create, I also need to experience the technology.
As we move into this next stage of our promised technological nirvana, it’s something I observe more closely now. Not just what these technologies offer us, but how they influence my attention, behaviour and relationship with reality, and how we collectively perceive it.
There’s also something quite fitting about the survival of this body of work. The original footage and project files appear to be lost. All that remains is the finished 1080p video export, a handful of still images and my memories of constructing the installation.
The physical installation no longer exists, and I doubt I’ll ever have access to that particular collection of equipment again.
Revisiting Signify, like many of my personal projects from this period, reminds me of the importance of simply responding to what I’m experiencing and making work without overthinking it.
Much of the work I created during those years didn’t find its language or meaning until much later. While I enjoy the process of conceptualising ideas and find it rewarding, I’m more aware now that over-conceptualising can become limiting within itself.
