(Dis)connect Series

"Influencer" is informed by both Soviet-era propaganda posters and the capitalistic consumer "cult" of image-focused social media videos. The piece expresses how social media video reels and their authors on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram have "plugged in" to our society as a new technology-driven channel of pseudo-information that either inadvertently– or by design– takes on a propagandistic role in shaping public opinion in both unpredictable and potentially deleterious ways. “Info Overload” is an extrapolation of information saturation to a time when humans are literally plugged in to the information feed, and are helpless to stop it. “Dreaming in Data” imagines a time when even our internal thoughts and dreams are wired into the Internet, both to feed and to capture information, even while we sleep. “Divided Attention” expresses how each of us has become extremes multitaskers, constantly switching contexts between our “in real life” world and the virtual world of our phone and computer screens.