An arts-led psychosocial approach to digital consumption: exploring Katriona Beales Are We All Addicts Now?

Online interfaces are increasingly designed to encourage elongated digital engagement and repetitive consumption. Amid a culture where the aesthetics of interfaces work to influence human behaviour, the expertise of artists, designers and other visual specialists could become more important than ever in understanding how extended periods of online consumption impact on wellbeing. The artist-led research project Are We All Addicts Now? by Katriona Beales was the first interdisciplinary investigation to explore links between interface design and increasing digital consumption. The project culminated in a major exhibition at Furtherfield, London, where an innovative psychosocial audience research method called the visual matrix was used to investigate how audiences experienced the exhibition. The visual matrix method differs from conventional audience research in the arts because it uses an experimental free-associative process to capture image-based and affect-driven aspects of audience responses to aesthetic stimuli. It originates out of psychosocial studies, a field of research that approaches the individual psyche as deeply intertwined with its social context. As a field of enquiry, psychosocial studies supports interpretation of the wellbeing impacts of technology as a product of the cultural and economic conditions that drive commercial interface design, elements that are often overlooked in clinical studies of ‘internet addiction’. This paper will introduce data from a visual matrix on the Are We All Addicts Now? exhibition, with an audience group who were recruited via the gallery website. It will show how ideas related to ambivalence, affect and agency emerged in audience responses to the exhibition. Using this case study as a basis, the paper will speculate on how arts-led psychosocial research might support investigation into the wellbeing impact of new technologies that are designed to create increased digital consumption, pushing beyond conventional narratives about ‘addiction’ and ‘distraction’ toward a more nuanced understanding of how technologies act upon us. http://www.furtherfield.org/are-we-all-addicts-now/