AYU WHITMORE 

I titled this audiovisual Across the Rubicon, referencing the phrase “crossing the Rubicon,” an idiom describing the passing of a point of no return. The project emerged from my awareness of how easily the search for belonging online can guide alienated individuals into extremist pipelines and algorithm-driven echo chambers. It begins satirically, parodying mainstream podcast culture before gradually devolving into Christian transhumanist rhetoric. Through this progression, I wanted to explore how excessive internet use can transform into a form of existential soul-searching, where the internet itself becomes another mechanism for what Mark Fisher described as “depressive anhedonia.” The work attempts to reflect a wider generational mental health crisis that is often dismissed as laziness within a society that increasingly privatises stress and emotional exhaustion.​

I do not think I was entirely successful in communicating these ideas as clearly as I had hoped. Unsurprisingly, I had to scale back the project significantly, resulting in major sections being cut and some narrative clarity being lost. Time constraints also pushed me towards relying more heavily on videography and editing techniques during the later psychedelic sequences, and I remain uncertain about how effectively these scenes visually communicate the themes. Moving forward, I would manage the project’s scope and expectations more carefully.

Despite this, I am very happy that the research process itself became formative. Through the project I discovered online collectives such as Do Not Research and Metalabel, both of which foreground experimental and transgressive independent work internationally. Rather than reinforcing narratives that “art is dead” in the age of AI, the project instead strengthened my belief that there is still a thriving and intellectually engaged online art scene that I would someday hope to contribute to and exhibit alongside.

On a technical level, if I were to create a similar project in the future, I would import my drawings as image sequences, a feature in Adobe After Effects that I only discovered after completing the project. This would have allowed me to conform the frame rate to my drawing speed more efficiently and avoid manually adjusting layer opacity to create the illusion of movement.