Do you have to be online to be relevant?
Do you have to be online to be relevant?
As plenty of reports continue to reveal, Zoomers are logging off in huge numbers, particularly turning their backs on both social media and dating app culture. Social media usage has fallen by as much as 10% in the past few years, driven mainly by Gen Z, who are embracing a “posting zero” mentality and using their profiles as time capsules or artifacts rather than actively using them. As a millennial, I am semi-immune to this urge. I still remember a time before social media, when the internet was in its infancy and restricted to a single “computer room” in the home. The online world was a discreet and finite concept, a place you could go to and leave rather than being attached to at all times. Millennial creative work, I think, reflects this, a kind of ‘tech as novelty’ overhang, while Gen Z art is increasingly defined by the push and pull emanating from the all-encompassing and increasingly threatening internet universe.
At 24 years old, Briony Godivala is among this cohort, although her work tentatively explores the relationship between art and technology rather than dismissing it entirely. A performance artist based in Glasgow, Briony’s most recent year-long project saw her blend her body, umbilical cord-like, to the internet machine. Named The Inked Link, the piece saw Godivala tattoo a QR code on her body, which gave anyone with access to the code the ability to upload and vote on whatever appeared on the corresponding web link for 24 years. The project, for which she had to be constantly connected to the URL, updating the link and cataloguing the most popular submissions every week, was meant to reflect the internet as it is today: an overload of information, community, control and morphing identity in the face of vastness and uncertainty. Unsurprisingly, it got pretty overwhelming at times.
“It got to the point where I was planning to leave social media entirely when the project ended”, Godivala says. “The links got increasingly hellish. I would be jump-scared by videos of suicide, shootings and graphic sex.” For a week in November, her site, controlled by her own body, displayed advertisements for a man who uploaded videos of him shitting into bags, which he then sold online. “It got to the point where I didn’t want to open it alone. But by the end of the project I think these people got bored, and it got taken over by mainly wholesome content; nostalgia, charity and creativity.”
By this point though, Godivala was exhausted by the scope of the project and the extremities of the uploads. Since finishing The Inked Link last month she hasn’t left social media – although she says she has learned that recording herself speaking to camera is not something she enjoys.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about making it in a more analog way”, Godivala says now the project is over. “But my work for a while has been intertwined with technology. Working with social media specifically is something I’ll maybe avoid in the future. The project in my comment section is often reluctantly accepted as ‘performance art’ and mainly described as a ‘social experiment’ or ‘attention-seeking’. I think working more analogue, or at least with an inclusion of physical media, could be a way to increase understanding on why I created the project in the first place, rather than ‘chasing instagram clout’.
“Though I wish it would be accepted as it is, as collaborative conceptual work made using social media, maybe the problem is that ‘social media art’ conflicts against the mystery and elitism of the classic art world. But that is an ongoing issue of accessibility.”
Godivala raises an important point – I think the real issue is not total separation from technology itself, as much as it is the implication of creating a two tier system of use. After all, for all its faults technology has improved access to various industries and communities, particularly in the arts, where it’s helped remove the historical gatekeeping boundaries that once existed around ‘networking’ and accessing job opportunities. If you don’t need to rely on the internet for those things though – if you already know who you need to know, and have the means to travel where you need to travel in real, corporeal form rather than on the grid – then why wouldn’t you log off? And why wouldn’t that create a situation where those who can take themselves offline, widening the gap that already exists in the creative industries, particularly in the UK, where only 8% of creatives are from working class backgrounds, a decade long nadir.
It feels cynical to suggest this, but perhaps there is a balance; an ability to sit somewhere between reclaiming power back from the tech oligarchs who have unprecedented access to our lives and personal data, and, on the other hand, creating yourself a luddite ivory tower where you can disengage entirely from the horrible things appearing on your iPhone screen. Today’s new generation of creatives have to learn to bridge that gap – but it’s something they’ve been doing, anyway, since COVID made that decision for them.
Philip Clarke, Course Leader in Fashion Communications, first joined CSM in 2019. Back then, pre-pandemic, the focus of creative education was offline – in writing for print, film photography, craft. “Then all that shifted”, Clarke says. “It forced students to think about what they could do in their bedrooms, or on their computers.” During COVID at least, technology worked to improve accessibility in a historically inaccessible industry. The days of students with physical sketchbooks and expensive equipment were gone – now everything is done and stored digitally. Some CSM final projects don’t require students to spend any money at all.
As the impact of the pandemic has faded though, a hybrid online approach hasn’t. And AI has complicated things even further. Partially this has forced a change in teaching styles (which remain face to face) and academic assessments – which have moved towards a more PhD, viva inspired model, with an interview portion so tutors can make sure the content is being properly understood. “It’s forced the students to think critically about AI”, Philip notes. “You need to be critical with AI because it’s so easy to take it at face value, either the information it’s giving you or the material it generates. You need that extra, meta-cognitive layer where you’re actually questioning the process and thinking about how to adapt it and disrupt it to create something that is less generic.”