At First Scroll  

In our post-internet era, where algorithmic curation and social media shape nearly every interaction, the kind of free, exploratory movement online feels like a thing of the past. I push back against that narrative in a body of work consisting of 6 videos of screen recordings, digital scans, computer-generated imageries, recreations of popular culture, and navigations of public databases, inviting us to consider how virtual environments shape our experiences of space and meaning. Swimming in the Middle of This Palm a multi-screen installation of moving images and sound, explores how digital spaces influence youth culture and experience, showing the dynamic, often disorienting relationship between the physical and digital worlds. Through looping videos and a multi-screen format, the installation echoes the overwhelming stimulation of the digital age, reflecting on how the loss of boredom has impacted creativity and fuelled collective anxiety. As we move through these digital landscapes, technology increasingly mediates our perceptions and interactions. Questions about spatiality, permanence, and memory take on new weight when looked through the digital realm. What does authenticity mean in this context? How does technological mediation reshape the construct of meaning and identity? These are the kinds of questions that feel urgent to me. Maybe the Cyberflâneur is gone or maybe they’ve evolved into something unrecognizable—but the impulse to explore and create meaning within these virtual spaces remains. For the youth especially, who are navigating these worlds as extensions of their reality, this process of exploration feels both inevitable and deeply human. 

The Early 20th Century Virtual Landscape: The Era of Remix 

Mark Fisher’s idea of the “Loss of Cultural Progress” feels essential to understanding the current virtual landscape. He argued that the 21st century has been defined by cultural stagnation, where genuine innovation has been replaced by a constant recycling of past aesthetics and ideas (Fisher). Through his concept of “hauntology,” Fisher suggests that we’re haunted by the futures we’ve lost—stuck in a loop that keeps us from imagining anything truly new. This looping is especially clear in how media today leans on reproduction as a form of cultural production. Fisher described it as a “jumbling up of time,” (Fisher 6) where fragments of earlier eras are spliced together to create an illusion of newness. In the making of Swimming in the Middle of This Palm, I recognize I exist in the era of the remix; my practice of reproducing media turns into a means of cultural reproduction. In this context, media appropriation has become one of the dominant creative tools. I remix and recontextualize existing cultural artifacts rather than building entirely new worlds. “I Woke Up This Morning Feeling Like A Chicken Nugget” is a video exploring the concept of remixing and “re-performance.” Thinking about labor within the spread of media, instead of sending someone a YouTube link, you send them a video of you recreating the original content.

Authenticity in the Age of Digital Representation

In the age of digital representation, the idea of authenticity feels very tangled. Media narratives are tightly controlled by powerful enterprises like Google and Apple, with corporations and conglomerates shaping what stories are told, whose voices are heard, and how we see the world. For example, using Google Street View, even though as Jon Rafman puts it- it is an “automated, industrial-scale endeavor” (Rafman), its automated image captures are operated and ultimately controlled by the Google database department. In this work, I employ screen recordings of Google Maps and satellite imagery to further explore this tension between automated capture and corporate control. I can't help but ask what is authentic about this digital information if it is controlled by Western companies. I also use mobile scanning software to render objects and people digitally, creating a juxtaposition between corporate-controlled imagery and personal digital representations. These scans, while capturing real-world objects, would have a degraded image quality. In This Room I have, the scanning of my apartment becomes illegible. Texts that are printed on products no longer hold meaning as they become distorted pixels. This degradation further complicates the notion of authenticity in digital representation. Algorithms only complicate this further. Built to maximize engagement and profit, they privilege content that grabs attention—usually the sensational or divisive—over anything nuanced or accurate. These Western systems carve out echo chambers, feeding us what we already believe and making it harder to encounter anything outside that bubble. And as algorithms get better at personalizing our feeds, the actual quality of what we’re consuming seems to decline. Viral content—low-res images, memes, endless short videos—often prioritizes speed and impact over any real depth. As Hito Steyerl puts it in her essay In Defense of the Poor Image: “the poor image has been uploaded, downloaded, shared, reformatted, and reedited. It transforms quality into accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, films into clips, contemplation into distraction” (Steyerl). Comparing James Benning’s 2011 YouTube to Kusanagi Suito’s 2024 After James Benning’s YouTube, a remake of Benning’s original one decade later, it's easy to see the relationship between the hegemony of the modern algorithm and the worsening of the quality of videos to be found. Representation in the digital age made me think of the representation of meaning. There has been a flattening of meaning and sentiments when it comes to existing through virtual spaces. The texts and notifications all seem the same—a heartfelt message from your family alongside a new Instagram follower notification. It is proof of the failure to duplicate physical realities into digital ones. All of this makes authenticity in digital spaces feel slippery. What does it mean to trust an image or a story in an environment designed for quick consumption? As we scroll through a flood of content that’s optimized for clicks rather than connection, the line between the authentic and the artificial becomes harder to trace. 

The Internet Takeover: A Paradigm Shift

The shift from desktop computers to smartphones marks a fundamental change in how we live with the internet. Using the internet 20 years ago used to be an activity to do, much like going to the park. It required intention, a specific space, and a focused mind. Now, with smartphones in our hands all day, the internet is no longer a destination but a constant presence—an ambient layer of our lives, always there, always on. But this constant access has reshaped our relationship with the digital realm, pulling us into a system that feeds on engagement and consumption. Every time we open our phones, we’re met with a flood of demands designed to keep us scrolling. It reminds me of Fredric Jameson’s idea of the “death of self” in late capitalism, where individual identity erodes, and we’re reduced to vessels of endless desire. Jameson writes about the “waning of affect,” which numbs our emotional lives in a world saturated by commodification. Our feeds reflect that perfectly—an infinite scroll of surface-level connections and distractions. There was something different about the early days of the internet before social media took over. It felt rhizomatic, full of unexpected pathways and discoveries. You didn’t know what you’d find because no one was curating it for you. Now, algorithms structure what we see, funneling us into patterns of consumption that strip away the freedom to explore for its own sake. That shift has quietly rewritten how we engage with knowledge, making us more passive and less curious. I explore this phenomenon in Swimming in the Middle of This Palm through screen-recorded evidence of algorithms, iPhone’s predictive texts, and the introspection of popular culture. A screen recording of a text body is produced entirely by clicking on the first suggested word.  There is a transgression of bounds that happens when we face the technological mediation between our internal and external desires. We have lost our autonomy in choosing what words should come after another, much like writing a letter, now we have language suggested to us through a series of codes, forever intermixing what we want to convey with what the phone thinks we want to convey. Returning to the philosophy of Mark Fisher, he described boredom as a utopian space, a pause that makes room for reflection and creativity. But today’s internet leaves no room for that. The constant stimulation creates a shared anxiety that follows us everywhere, collapsing the space between our digital and physical lives. The installation of this work reflects this notion, with multiple screens and looping videos, there is no room for a break. The attention of the audience is constantly getting push-and-pulled, to whatever is the brighter and most stimulating. The internet has become more than just a tool or a platform—it’s an ecosystem that shapes who we are, what we feel, and how we understand the world. And in this new paradigm, it feels harder than ever to reclaim the stillness and agency that once defined those early interactions. 

Technological Mediation and Meaning-Making

In an untitled video, I navigated the 2024 Google Maps of Taichung, Taiwan, through a familiar street that I grew up on. Let Me Tell You Something About Where I’m From depicts a screenshot from the video where the street view is clear. The way we use our thumbs to navigate our phones has become second nature—a physical extension of how we think and make sense of the digital realm. Scrolling, zooming, tapping—these gestures feel so intuitive now, almost seamless, yet they carry weight in shaping how we experience and interpret information. It’s a subtle choreography between body and technology, shaping not just usability but how we connect with what we see. For many videos in Swimming in the Middle of This Palm, there’s a very self-referential gestural element that points to my navigation of apps and interfaces. I think it intrigues me how fleeting these gestures feel, they vanish the second they’re performed, yet the technologies behind them refuse to be ephemeral. Digital content lingers, backed up and stored, defying the impermanence of our touch. This persistence reshapes what the virtual realm means, turning our momentary actions into enduring traces. There’s a tension here, a negotiation—between the transient act of swiping and the permanence of what gets left behind, a space where meaning is always in flux. 

The Youth Experience at the Digital-Physical Intersection 

In a video titled Justin Bieber, I recorded paparazzi videos of Justin Bieber in his prime through my laptop screen, in a way becoming one of the paparazzi. In another way, I think about how we all experience past events or emotions through the constant reminders we get on our phones: iPhone photo album makes galleries of past events, while Snapchat and Instagram give you a rewind of what you did years ago on this date. In the same sense, Justin Bieber could be lying in bed at home on TikTok and he could come across a video of him in the height of his career. He would then be experiencing a kind of digital death of witnessing what was preserved on the internet that no longer exists. I think Justin Bieber is just a surrogate for how I would like to think about our own digital deaths—the information left in the digital graveyard. In Swimming in the Middle of This Palm, I remix internet languages, memes, and media. The way the youth navigate the overlap between the digital and physical worlds is deeply shaped by our fetishization of gadgets and the aesthetics of the internet. Technology isn’t just functional; it’s a status symbol, a way to signal who we are. For a lot of us, devices like an iPhone aren’t just tools but extensions of identity. This fixation transforms the way we interact online, where the visuals—how something looks—often feel more important than what it means. In this work, I am centering the visuals and the installation around this culture. This fascination with the touchscreens. Much like television is the age Nam June Paik was working under, touchscreen is the age this work exists under. I also nod to the visual language that is prominent online at this very specific time. In another video, I explore the concept of spectatorship and spectacle. Starting with a soundscape of Disney + song, IOS notification sounds, the MGM lion roar, to the intro song of PornHub, the video then shows a clip of mud wrestling between two boys , followed by a series of mud wrestling stock images. I have never experienced mud wrestling before, I have never seen it nor participated in it. But I’ve seen photographs of it all over the internet for so long that I no longer feel its shock factor. In some ways, people now get desensitized to the meaning of sounds, and different planes of digital information get flattened into one. It is easy to de-contextualize the things we engage with online. Mud wrestling is a meme. In Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, Gretchen McCulloch explores how memes resonate with us as a form of cultural shorthand. Memes distill shared experiences, humor, and emotions into something instantly recognizable, creating a sense of belonging. Memes are also participatory—they’re meant to be remixed, reinterpreted, and shared. By adopting internet languages and remixing memes and media, this work would be injected into the pool of ongoing dialog of the digital intersection of youth lives. At this intersection of gadget culture and meme-making, young people aren’t just passive consumers; we are creators, constantly shaping and reshaping what it means to exist in this space. It’s a balancing act—negotiating between who we really are and who we present ourselves to be online. This tension makes the digital-physical intersection a place where identity is constantly being tested, curated, and redefined, all against the backdrop of a world driven by rapid technological change, which was why I started making this body of work.

This Digital Palm

Swimming in the Middle of This Palm contemplates the relationship between digital representation and youth experience in a post-internet world. In this work, I question the supposed decline of the Cyberflâneur, suggesting that while the way we explore online spaces has shifted, the urge to find meaning in virtual realms persists. The work engages with Fisher’s ideas on cultural stagnation, examining how digital media often recycles past aesthetics instead of fostering innovation. This loop of media reproduction and appropriation underscores a dominant trend in contemporary cultural production that I mirror in the production of this work. The installation interrogates the authenticity of digital representation in a time when Western corporate control over media narratives and algorithmic curation shapes our perceptions. It examines the tension between the democratization of content creation and the erosion of image quality. A focus of the work is the shift smartphones have introduced, turning internet access from an intentional act into a constant backdrop to daily life. This omnipresence deeply affects how we form identities, connect emotionally, and construct meaning across digital and physical spaces. It is how we live in the world now. It also considers how touchscreens and other forms of technological mediation shape our interactions with digital content, leaving persistent traces in a seemingly ephemeral medium. The work situates itself in the evolving conversation about where the digital and physical intersect. It asks us to reflect on how we navigate these complex spaces—balancing authentic expression with curated personas—and what this tension reveals about identity in an era of rapid technological change.