DAYANA MATASHEVA
The mundane acts of scrolling, checking, and chatting form the core of my practice. An online overstimulation is a deceptive surface; underneath it lies mathematical indifference, contractual obligations, and endless Turing Tests (Is the girl you’re texting an AI?). My projects attempt to de-escalate the online experience, drain it of eye-candy and image fetishism, strip it down to affect, and look at the bureaucratic structures that govern it.
Some projects use signage and questionnaires (such as Facebook’s classic What’s on your mind?) as gravitational poles, some examine the act of scrolling from outside the screen, some foreground the mechanics of viral challenges. The purpose is to induce collective boredom and look at what the technology does to us at the level of perception. What does it mean to be part of humanity, enjoying its own obsolescence as a supreme aesthetic pleasure?
I think of my participants as John and Jane Does moving through waiting areas, airport body scans, surveillance cameras, and interrogation rooms. Their luggage is X-rayed and gutted under fluorescent lights, exposing the prepackaged identity it carries (and the hidden pockets it attempts to conceal). I don’t pathologize or psychologize my subjects; I don’t give them control or agency either. I simply watch and record, scraping large amounts of private, sentimental, and biographical data.
Corporate, bureaucratic, and legal architectures, contractual obligations, and arbitrary moral expectations define the chalk outlines of personhood. We accept these boundaries by inertia, volunteering information to the systems that enforce them, systems we cannot influence, decode, or exit. As these infrastructures become more intricate and less legible, my work examines how individuals comply with them and how this compliance edges us toward our own obsolescence.