DOOMSCROLL DREAMMACHINE extends a speculative media history in which broadcast systems, the early internet, and contemporary social platforms function as entrainment technologies—tools engineered to trigger altered states, first discovered by accident, later refined by unknown agencies, and ultimately absorbed into governmental and corporate infrastructure.
The work reframes Brion Gysin’s flicker device through the compulsions of infinite scroll. LED fan displays and projected feeds draw the eye into micro-rhythms of attention—the fragment, the swipe, the downward drift—turning doomscrolling into an inadvertent altered-state technology. In this context, the scroll behaves like a technological mani wheel: a ritual interface where repetition, image, and desire converge into a programmable trance.
A UV-printed canvas, designed by Darius Ou and mounted as a suspended scroll, maps a speculative timeline of these covert developments. Cut-up logics, broadcast signals, and algorithmic patterns converge into a single entrainment loop, charting a secret history of media shaped by ambivalent, hidden forces. The form recalls both ceremonial banners and the unspooling feed, linking spiritual technologies of attention to the infrastructures that later replaced them.
The audio layer, composed by Mervin Wong, deepens this cosmology. Using a generative engine that ingests and manipulates streams of online chatter, the soundscape breaks speech, notification tones, and digital residue into pulses, granular fragments, and spectral traces. These elements continuously recombine, producing an acoustic field that oscillates between overload and drift—a sonic analogue to the trance conditions embedded in contemporary interface design.
Taken together, the components position DOOMSCROLL DREAMMACHINE within a larger narrative: a world in which media technologies have long operated as devices for shaping consciousness, and where today’s social platforms quietly extend the same lineage—masked as entertainment, optimized as infrastructure, and refined by entities operating just beyond public view.
Graphic Design: Darius Ou
Sound Design: Mervin Wong
Fabrication: Red_orchid_99
Photography: Marie-Luise Skibbe
