Disintegration Cycle (2023), is a simulation of Instagram’s Explore page – a web of algorithmically charged content that produces, repurposes and reflects back societies’ surplus opinion and discontents. The piece is a nonlinear timeline where original content intervenes and responds to viral clips scraped from the ever-expanding geo-specific hyperobject of social media.
In all, the work presents what I would describe as “a CTE-inducing (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) snapshot” of South African society which scrutinizes the sphere of social media, its instruments, and the integral aspects of content production and consumption, influence and attention. In this new marketplace, group politics and social norms are brought into sharp focus, and the ways in which they are used to drive passive engagement.
The concept has spawned from the modes and themes of content within the artists’ Explore pages on Instagram but more disquietingly the relative absence of significant aspects of South African society, like state failure, societal decay, and political discord.
The resulting video is a violent cocktail of hyperconnected society, which CUSS Group has rendered as an antiglare plate-glass video installation. The work ramps up intensity with the only intended consequence of leaving the viewer with the need to disconnect.
