Excerpt and stills from “The Beach”
2017
single channel video projection
90 minutes
The Beach is a single-channel video projection that immerses viewers in the allure of a serene, tropical beach scene. This seemingly meditative, screensaver-like environment draws viewers into a familiar visual comfort, only to be disrupted at intervals by bursts of sourced digital content. The project begins with an act of digital hoarding, a compulsive collection of stereotypical stock images, sounds, and video sequences sourced from platforms like Google, YouTube stock accounts, and stock footage websites. These digital ready-mades—pre-produced and generic visual elements—reflect a standardized way of seeing, reinforcing oversimplified and automated aesthetics that saturate contemporary visual culture.
By collecting and reassembling this content into an “irrational mess,” The Beach embraces the absurdity of contemporary digital life, where overstimulation and image saturation have become commonplace. Through the processes of sourcing, decontextualizing, and re-contextualizing, the work probes the power and influence of digital content, questioning its impact on our perception of visual language. This piece acknowledges the rapid, unpredictable evolution of internet culture and draws inspiration from meme and remix culture, where familiar imagery is reimagined to subvert its original meaning. In this way, The Beach functions as both a critique and an exploration of the digital sublime, inviting viewers to reflect on the influence of ubiquitous media and the surreal spectacle it creates in our daily lives.
single channel video projection
90 minutes
The Beach is a single-channel video projection that immerses viewers in the allure of a serene, tropical beach scene. This seemingly meditative, screensaver-like environment draws viewers into a familiar visual comfort, only to be disrupted at intervals by bursts of sourced digital content. The project begins with an act of digital hoarding, a compulsive collection of stereotypical stock images, sounds, and video sequences sourced from platforms like Google, YouTube stock accounts, and stock footage websites. These digital ready-mades—pre-produced and generic visual elements—reflect a standardized way of seeing, reinforcing oversimplified and automated aesthetics that saturate contemporary visual culture.
By collecting and reassembling this content into an “irrational mess,” The Beach embraces the absurdity of contemporary digital life, where overstimulation and image saturation have become commonplace. Through the processes of sourcing, decontextualizing, and re-contextualizing, the work probes the power and influence of digital content, questioning its impact on our perception of visual language. This piece acknowledges the rapid, unpredictable evolution of internet culture and draws inspiration from meme and remix culture, where familiar imagery is reimagined to subvert its original meaning. In this way, The Beach functions as both a critique and an exploration of the digital sublime, inviting viewers to reflect on the influence of ubiquitous media and the surreal spectacle it creates in our daily lives.