We live in a hyper-mediated world. Our everyday experiences are shaped by the sublime flows of always-on content. The cute, funny and comforting collide with the friction and exhaustion of having our attention and labour colonised as we scroll, swipe and tap. How do we make sense of our world, of our life stories and futures, in digital feeds that seemingly have no beginning and no end, no plot development or climax—just one algorithmically recommended image, video, show, profile, post, task, and message after another in an infinite loop?
This anthology brings together artworks from the Conflict in My Outlook exhibition series presented at the University of Queensland Art Museum from 2020 to 2022 with textual provocations from leading Australian and international scholars and writers. Together, they explore our digital condition and the techno-politics that define our age. The anthology’s distinctive focus on contemporary art opens up original explorations of our hyper-mediated, image-saturated cultures. Instagram and TikTok, platforms that shape these cultures, depend, of course, on the visual. They are organised around the creation and sharing of images, and their translation into data that trains machine vision systems.
The interplay between artistic practice and the provocations of scholars in this collection reminds us that the stakes of our present and future are framed in our commitment to joining together critique with collaboration, experimentation, and creativity. Artists, activists, researchers and public intellectuals are each imbricated in the critical practices of representing and reimagining life in the era of datafication, automation and simulation.