is an online interactive installation. It responds to the user’s actions by
presenting satirical content through retro graphics, images, and rhetorical texts.
These features contain misinformation to arouse suspicion and existential questions on the nature of internet navigation and our zeitgeist.
The website is accessed via a QR code that is present in the gallery space amongst VHS covers that gallery-goers are invited to handle.
Jesse Mahoney, ‘Trustworthy Website’, 2023, one of the various cover designs that invites the user via the QR code to the website
Jesse Mahoney, ‘Trustworthy Website’, 2023, the site asks the observer a series of broad questions. For instance, ‘Are you after an authentic experience?’ The user answers these prompts that will then take them down rabbit holes simulating internet schemes and dark-web navigation.Jesse Mahoney, ‘Trustworthy Website’, 2023, the VHS covers utilise graphics relevant to the content within the trustworthy website.Jesse Mahoney, ‘Trustworthy Website’, 2023, another subjective experience of beauty, and how an AI may try to emulate our sense of The Sublime within the modern landscape.
Jesse Mahoney, ‘Trustworthy Website’, 2023, a webpage that simulates conspiracy theories and misinformation – this one in question is about the nature of The Mad Cow Disease and enlightenment – based on themes of absurdity and cosmic horror.
Jesse Mahoney, ‘Trustworthy Website’, 2023, for inspiration, Mark Auge’s Non-Places and JG Billard’s depiction of concrete liminal spaces have captured the psyche of hypermodernism and I’ve attempted to explore these subjects through the VHS covers and website. The above image stands as a combination of these inspirations.
Notes on Practice – Playing with food but not eating it
During our post-lockdown tremors, many of us have been stuck behind screens. With this comes divided attention, divided truth and the prospect of a strange future. One where we no longer maintain truth, order or calendar and are therefore condemned to repeat disintegrating hauntological loops – in short – the ongoing atomisation of society. I want to express our contemporary phase in this process and demonstrate how anticipated trends may lead to this outcome. My practice is speculative and I suggest these as thought experiments rather than pretend they’re all-conclusive of an outcome; indeed I hope they’re not and want to stress the importance of the human element to these themes.
