Jay Treagus

A Twitter Live Stream

“... rather than a momentary shock, [the digital] sublime extends in time, a relentless mix of pleasure and pain without relief. [It is] a sublime that descends, in contrast to Kant's imagery of elevation, lift and raising over or above. The terms that describe wallowing in internet culture (deep dive, clickhole, etc) indeed suggest a spiralling down into depths—despite the obvious lack of depth to the screens we use. Is there such a thing as depth to a sequential series of flat images?"[1] At the start of the twenty-first century, it was common for the peoples of many cultures around the globe to regularly access вЂsocial media’. These networked digital platforms allowed individuals to access and contribute to vast libraries of data, with some studies estimating that around 2,500,000,000 GB were created daily[2]. So much information would have been impossible to keep up with or rationally interpret, instead it is thought that the unyielding content stream was used as a meditative aid, allowing individuals glimpses into the transcendental scale at which the world really operated, far beyond human conception. This work, made possible through collaboration with the Lambent Institute, invites you to sit a while, and meditate on these images as our forebears may once have done. 1) Annie Dorson, The Sublime and the Digital Landscape.” Theater, vol. 48, no. 1, 2018, pp. 55–67. 2) https://www.domo.com/learn/infographic/data-never-sleeps-5

Jay Treagus is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher. Their work explores the contemporary dynamics of technology, belief and knowledge making. It spans both digital and physical worlds; artefacts, installation, performance, and site specific interventions; as well as academic and fictive (hyper)texts. Running through these varied forms is a post-factual viewpoint, which regards mythology, conspiracy and esotericism as immersive technologies in their own right, and attempts to understand the ways in which they can be leveraged to do work in the world. This stance is, at its heart, concerned with developing practical tools for survival in a world which increasingly defies human projects of mastery. They hold an MA in Digital Media from Goldsmiths University, and are currently awaiting the publication of their first paper.