Digital Malaise

Digital Malaise examines the saturation and compression of visual information in an increasingly screen-based world. We move through environments in which images accumulate, scroll past, and stack like tabs and windows, processed at extraordinary speed and forgotten almost as quickly. The series adopts this structure—edges, screens, overlays, collapsed boundaries—to question how perception is shaped within technological systems. Patterns drawn from Op Art, world folk traditions, pixelation, and digital camouflage are nested within geometric planes, sometimes contained and sometimes flowing beyond the edge. These painstakingly hand-painted patterns generate optical depth that is juxtaposed with organic, amorphic forms, stabilizing and complicating the techno-enhanced visual field.

Unable to extricate ourselves from technology yet uncertain of its impact on memory and time, we inhabit a state of cognitive acceleration. The works respond by creating zones of visual pause: surfaces that both contain and intensify perception. Through layered pattern, repetition, and optical disruption, Digital Malaise slows the act of looking, inviting viewers to move from initial sensory overload toward attentive recognition of the relationships among disparate forms. In doing so, the series probes how technological visuality reorganizes attention, memory, and our experience of temporal flow.