Developing a critical technical audiovisual performance practice engaging with 'the web' as both medium and subject matter.

Overview

Scroll is the second performance project I developed. It consists partially of a planned performance section, tied quite explicitly to narrative, and partially of a shorter improvised section. As the name suggests, it is a reflection and commentary of the activity of ‘doomscrolling’, the phenomenon of getting habitually ‘stuck’ in a website, not particularly enjoying the content you’re consuming but not being able to disengage either (Anshul Mandliya et al., 2024).

Project

Development

After building and reflecting on Clock, I was very much interested in framing my works as a ‘browser performance’. The idea of the mouse being a kind actor in the whole thing, and my navigation of the UI being expressive gestures. Particularly influential to this thinking were two practices/artworks. The first performance practice of Jon Sartrom ↗, in which he operates a computer in front of an audience, navigating glitches and bugs as they appear with increasing chaos and absurdity (TEDx Talks, 2013). And the second being Antonymph ↗ by Lyra Rebane ↗, an amazingly complex ‘audiovisual web experience that uses your browser as the medium’ (Rebane, n.d), comprising a nostalgic celebration of the 2000s web.

In terms of developing the concept, this is the piece that is the most explicitly reactive to the issues around platformisation and addictive algorithms discussed in Context: The Web. I had a very particular kind of online experience I wanted to capture and portray and so I decided to base my tool design and performance around a specific narrative; the process of one person joining a new social media site, intending to use it to pass time consuming content about their interests, but inevitably getting swayed by habit and the algorithm to enter an ‘endless scroll’.

How It Works

There are three sections to the piece, corresponding to three sections in the tool. First, the very brief ‘choose your interests’ welcome screen. This is set up so that after four interests have been picked, the UI will automatically select ‘the void’ and move the user onto the next section. This is ‘the blog’, the user scrolls down this, playing the embedded videos, and clicking the ‘like’ buttons to generate sound, there is also an automated ‘notification’ sound scheduled throughout. Once the user scrolls to a certain point they are prompted to ‘enter the void’, which is a link to the third and last section: ‘the void’.

‘The Void’ serves as a break away from the illustrated narrative of ‘person using a website’, representing a ‘breaking point’ in the doom scroll, becoming overwhelmed by information and collapsing into a depressed state. Functionality, it is a noise instrument, with increasing instances of white noise that can be manipulated with various automatable effects.

Reflections

This was a tricky concept to negotiate. Having a quite clear idea of a narrative I wanted to portray, as opposed to broader concepts I wanted simply reference in the work (as with Clock and TAB) forced me to consider more contexts than I had had to in other works. For example, considering Antonymph, the piece that had inspired me to try a more narrative-based and visually literal approach, that artwork contains examples of illustration, written dialogue, animation, and narrative design in addition to web development and music.

This browser-based storytelling approach ultimately constitutes a whole other thread I could follow in my practice, and I decided that to follow further at this juncture would take me beyond the scope of my research aims. The last ten minutes of Scroll, the improvised section that takes place in ‘The Void’ felt more like a continuation of the musical and gestural ideas I wanted to develop, and as seen in the next project TAB, I decided to build on this to advance the practice.