dystopia and its content(ment)s

In his seminal (1929) book, Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud enumerates what he sees as the fundamental tensions between civilization and the individual. The primary friction, he asserts, stems from the individual's quest for instinctual freedom and civilization's contrary demand for conformity.

The proliferation and currency of information in today’s global world has, on the one side enabled certain individual access and plurality of expression, yet on the other side it has produced shared identities, homogeneity, broad conformity, or essentially, a dystopian logic of authority. In this new logic the flow of information is heralded as utopian in and of itself, and its conforming and authoritarian force that controls desire, consumption, and mobility becomes invisible.

Through three individual perspectives, Dystopia and its Content(ment)s imagines our techno-social, image-orientated reality as dystopian and yet posits instances of personal contentment within it.

EXHIBITION
Tumblrroom Marc Lafia's photography and films are culled and adapted from social network platforms such as Tumblr and Chatroulette. The artist's concentration is not on the autonomy of the individual image but instead on its status as a platform for social exchange and currency as information. The photographs and films are testaments to private desires and disaffection made collective in the image's circulation and ongoing engagement with an often anonymous but networked public.