Cory Arcangel at the NGCA Collection Space A solo-show in Sunderland, UK

 is from a series of artworks called ‘Runners’ by American artist Cory Arcangel. Arcangel’s work explores the potential and failures of old and new digital technologies, highlighting their obsolescence, humour, aesthetics and, at times, eerie influence on contemporary life. 

 is a single-channel screen recording of a live bot performance on Instagram. Screen captured via a smartphone on 8 December 2019 the recording scrolls through a year’s worth of Amazon’s Instagram feed with a live bot programmed by the artist liking each post in turn. The screen has been turned horizontally to give the viewer the impression of watching a film tracking from left to right as opposed to the conventional scrolling down motion of Instagram. The artist’s intention is to highlight the pervasiveness of advertising that encourages capitalist consumerism.

Social media platforms are progressively being used to covertly extract meta data on personal interests for commercial gain. The use of pop-up advertisements extend the browsing time of users for this purpose and Arcangel exposes the often mundane and surreptitious methods they use to seduce users into buying ‘things’ they do not often need. (...)