FoMO| fōmō |or ‘Fear of Missing Out’

pervasive anxiety, exponentially compounded by voyeurism in social media, that something better is always happening somewhere else. 

 

What is that agitation I feel whilst spending time on social media, looking at projections of my ‘friends’ lives? How does hyper-connectivity, and the feeling of being seen online, change my perception of myself?  I wanted to feel my friends’ embodied presence, in contrast to the constant presence of their absence via my digital social life. If we shared my life, could I see it through their eyes? Could I take on their qualities and aesthetics, in the residue of a shared experience? Could I create a performance as if I were someone else? 

 

FoMO, mofos! (Fear of Missing Out, motherf***ers!) is a solo based on 5 duets.

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Part homage, part identity theft.  

 

5 artists spent a week with me, one by one. They traveled from Leeds, Berlin, Brussels and Rotterdam to Liverpool's Metal Culture, befittingly housed within a train station. For the 5th collaboration, we travelled together to France work in residency at Au Brana. 

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I was drawn to each artist by a spark of mutual admiration and recognition -- perhaps a common wildness, or a sense of belonging to the edges?

 

Following our instincts and interests in the studio, we shared practice, daily life and outside diversions.  

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After each artist departed, I created a chapter of the solo. It was a complex and fascinating process to integrate the accumulated material into a coherent solo work.