Above is an early experiment where I translated my direct experience of a nature walk (without electronic devices) to Granton Harbour into emojis on Facebook Messenger. This required recollection of the first hand experience and selection of appropriate symbols to communicate what I experienced, which was often difficult.

This experiment came out of an interest in the concept of the Spectacle where all life has become mediated through signs – streams of images:

All life in a capitalist society presents itself as an accumulation of spectacles

Everything that was directly lived has moved into representation

Images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream

Reality becomes an object of mere contemplation

The spectacle simultaneously presents itself as all of society and as an instrument of unification

It is not a collection of images, it is a social relation among people, mediated by images

– Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

I wanted to continue exploring some of the concerns of my previous projects (mass culture, information, analogue and digital, entertainment) while working in some of Debord’s writing on the Society of the Spectacle. His opening chapter in particular spoke to a frustration with my own inability to ignore social and entertainment media (TV, mobile phone, laptop). This project began as a way to paradoxically distract myself from my devices and also as a way to consider how we experience reality in the age of social media.

I chose the word stream as a starting point because I was concerned with both the natural and social media definitions of the word – I like to use binaries. Although I then became a bit lost in terms of what I was focusing on:

Nature – Technology

Reality – Virtual reality

Natural – Urban

Real experience – Virtual experience

Private – Social

Object – Image

Life – Image

Experience – Appearance

First hand – Second hand

Direct – Indirect

I had intended to produce all sorts of visual responses to “stream” but didn’t produce nearly enough work to make this worthwhile – result was