Born into a post-internet world, I have been online for as long as I can remember. I used to believe that logging on meant logging out of the “real” world. However, I now see that this binary framing, offline-online, real-virtual, material-intangible, oversimplifies my experience because it fails to recognise that my digital self doesn’t function independently of my physical self. My identity is hybridised, existing in the blurred space between online and offline. Motivated by a desire to understand the internet’s effect on my identity and art practice, this practice-led research aims to discover how the ingrained algorithmic patterns of social media platforms like Tumblr and Instagram have shaped my creative outputs and research methodology, utilising intuition, algorithmic logic, and rapid episodic making with everyday found materials and readymades. In doing so, this research highlights how the social media generation, my generation, is not just a passive consumer of internet algorithms and cultures, but has been shaped by them creatively, socially, and psychologically.
