Compulsory Continuous Connectedness: Rest in a Networked World

This autumn Focal Point Gallery presents a group show exploring the impact of networked media on our collective mental wellbeing. Compulsory Continuous Connectedness: Rest in a Networked World is led by a new commission and research from artists Caroline Sinders and Romy Gad el Rab, and features work by Helen Cammock, Nina Davies, Rebecca Moccia, Salvatore Vitale and Qualeasha Wood.

The works featured address the mechanisms by which digital platforms reshape our lives and wellbeing, while also inviting visitors to consider whether the alternative to our networked world might not be to simply switch off, but to switch on a different kind of thinking, where rest is both resistance and replenishment.

Media scholar Ludmila Lupinacci coined the term "compulsory continuous connectedness" to describe our contemporary state of being online, addressing the impossibility of logging off and the paradoxical feelings of overwhelm and isolation created by tools designed to connect us. The first section of the exhibition features artists whose work explores this concept. Salvatore Vitale's Death by GPS (2022-26) explores the hidden human labour in supposedly automated systems, Rebecca Moccia's Ministry of Loneliness (2022-24) reveals the emotional impacts of living with networked systems, Qualeasha Wood's tapestries examine digital overconsumption, glitch and the warping of selfhood under platform pressures, and Nina Davies's film and installation questions the body's relationship to its own image under platform systems.

In the exhibition's second half, a major new installation by Caroline Sinders and Romy Gad el Rab proposes a resistant way to exist in our chronically online world, based on research into the Default Mode Network, the neural connections said to be active during wakeful rest. Bringing together input from artists, scientists, academics, activists, and local youth and mental health organisations in Southend, Sinders and Gad el Rab create conditions to prompt active rest inside the gallery.