When Michael J. Arlen, television critic for The New Yorker, coined the term “living-room war” in 1966, he not only encapsulated a paradigm shift in modern media during the Vietnam War, but also anticipated the social impact of televised conflicts for the next five decades. Of principal concern for Arlen was the “excessively simple, emotional, and military-oriented view of what is, at best, a mighty unsimple situation,” a crude “our guys against their guys” morality tale produced through a nightly stream of “three- and five-minute film clips”. Perhaps inconceivable from the vantage of the mid nineteen sixties is the risk that the dissemination of violence through mass media would produce, not simplistic “our guys versus their guys” narratives, but an increasingly fragmented misapprehension of the situation depicted. Scrolling a vertical video platform in 2022, one encounters GoPro footage of drone strikes in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza mixed in with what Philip Mirowski described as the everyday sadism of neoliberalism—videos mocking the homeless, ‘social experiments’ that provoke violent outbursts from members of the general public, harassment of low paid service workers, and psychological, physical and vehicular ‘crash-outs’. As such, and pace Arlen, one must wonder what kind of effect this constant stream of brutality produces: perhaps a kind of alternative Ludovico Technique that, rather than inducing nausea in response to violent acts, results in a nullification, or a callous ennui, as a means of enduring such content.
        The question of what it means, or might mean, to bear witness to an avalanche of benign slop and brutal realities, all refracted through the prism of social media, is at the core of Gemma Weston’s Witnessing, held at _____g.s. For Weston, this question is addressed through the “recording” of the phenomenon through a kind of list-making: in the gallery, 268 pages are adhered to the walls, each with two rows of text in Comic Sans with white lettering set against black. In its minimalist construction, the font strikes as an interesting choice: the goofy silliness of Comic Sans, which now seems largely confined to insipid office-culture memes and ironic art-adjacent web content, stands in sharp contrast to the black redaction-like bars that have become all too familiar in the age of the Epstein files. Scanning the walls, it is tempting to scrutinise each row in an attempt to find within it some revelation, narrative, or logic. Yet this soon feels futile: each row, notwithstanding Weston’s intervention as scribe, recounts the chaos of Instagram Reels she witnesses. Put differently, this is the work’s central antinomy—the intractability of taxonomic sense-making when set against the chaos of short-video algorithms.



A granular reading could, for instance, begin in the top left corner of the first gallery wall, where Weston’s notes register the late-February circulation of posts about Aaron Bushnell’s death on 25 February 2024, following his self-immolation in protest of the ongoing devastation in Gaza. One might then scan down and across the lists of Instagram content, moving from adverts:


to artworld content:

to the inane:


Yet, to mount this reading material on the walls, floor to ceiling, makes clear that the intention is not for it to be read in a granular fashion and instead to consider them en masse, as a whole work. With this, the attempt to turn images into text inverts; the taxonomy becomes a maelstrom of gibberish text—perhaps replicating its source material.
        Any artist attempting to tackle the cultural impact of the internet, and especially its increasingly caustic and anti-social dimensions, is faced with a considerable challenge. Not only does one face the problem of meaningfully embodying and reflecting upon the twenty-four-seven stream of everyday sadism offered by social media, one must also contend with the everyday dadaism of internet folk art genres like CoreCore. Indeed, as the recent trend of worshipping the Perth ‘Cactus’ shows,[1] it has become somewhat humdrum and expected for young people to respond to the absurdity of online communication and culture through performative acts of senselessness—not unlike the ubiquity of pop-punk and shopping mall emo in the late nineties and early 2000s, that functioned as a kind of ersatz ennui when compared to the punk of the nineteen seventies. Given that vertical video platforms are replete with serious short form criticism on the topic of media culture and digital communication, surreal AI parodies of cyber trends, and a plethora of global oddities and interventions, the artist is left somewhat sidelined and flatfooted when they assume the role of cultural critique.       
        An available aesthetic strategy would be to search for order and stability through the communicative strictures of rumination, list making, and categorisation (no matter how oblique and opaque such categories may be to the viewer). Such a strategy could be read into Weston’s work, so as to reveal a determination to offer little tonal inflection or judgement on the content being recorded. Instead, the viewer is offered mere descriptions that are detached and unembellished—simply informative, and, following Sianne Ngai, ‘merely interesting’. Here the forerunners might be On Kawara’s Today series (beginning in 1966) or Hans Haacke’s News (1969, updated in 2005 and 2008), which shares several similarities with Weston’s project. The first iteration of News was presented at Prospect 69 at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and comprised an installed telex machine set to print news dispatches from the German press agency DPA. After printing, the ream was then left for visitors to read before, on the third day after each respective print, it would be rolled up, dated, labelled, and stored in Plexiglas containers. Haacke updated the work in 2005, this time substituting the telex machine with a dot-matrix printer that collected news from Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds online. On this reading, Weston, like Kawara and Haacke, flattens content into the literal and monotonous, avoiding narrative or editorialising in favour of the sheer volume and weight of time and information. In this sense, the work can be apprehended at the level of a kind of monastic quietism or psychoanalytic durcharbeiten or ‘working through’. In an almost ethical act of passivity and neutrality, the material encountered online is simply presented for detached reflection without telos or judgement—almost as if to say, if we lay everything out on the wall, maybe it will start to make sense.



Such a reading helps us to account for the presence of the printed reproduction of the wall text made available to the viewer. Initially, it seems puzzling that the principal work is reproduced in printed miniature—if the point is to overwhelm the viewer with the sheer scale of information and abstraction by surrounding their field of vision with content, why create the pressure release valve of the handheld printed material that can be perused at one’s leisure and convenience? Perhaps Weston’s intent was to simulate the disturbing ease with which we reach for our handheld device in order to avoid the overwhelming realities of everyday life, or to bridge some kind of digital divide by making content material and tangible. On this latter point, we can find another link to Haacke, since, as Ara H. Merjian notes,

on a basic level, News (1969/2008), for example, transforms anecdotal reportage into reams of paper, reflecting, in part, upon the de-humanization of the digital age. But at a time when the world’s daily descriptions circulate virtually, this work lends those anecdotes a hard and fast materiality.

For Merjian, the transformation of the digital into the physical in News (1969/2008) represents ‘the remnants of the last industrial revolution [which] at least left us monuments to their particular form of oblivion.’ Less flattering of this digital-to-print conversion is a review in The New Yorker of The New Museum’s 2010 exhibit, The Last Newspaper, which also included Haacke’s recalibrated News:

[The exhibition] doesn’t so much comment on the impending death of print news as envision a world in which print has long been dead; the only purpose it serves is to be repurposed as art. […] The mere concept of recording news on paper is treated as a quaint novelty […] because it’s an actual physical object.

However, it is arguably more compelling to view the gesture as less illustrative and again ethical—a sign of reciprocity; a gentle offering for the viewer’s consideration and an acknowledgment that the artist alone cannot make sense of it all.
        If this reading of Weston’s work can be defended, the question we must ponder in closing is not whether Witnessing is a successful body of work, but by what standard and at what cost is it successful? We would argue that Witnessing should be viewed as a successful advancement of an aesthetic and ethical strategy of disappointment; an attempt to underwhelm rather than overwhelm the viewer as a way of avoiding the repetition of worn-out Dadaist shock tactics or the assumption of an unconvincing and unsustainable position of moral superiority over and against the digital spectator. Paradoxically high risk in its modesty, the critical function of this strategy is to point towards the difficulty of making sense of online culture and our relationship to it. As such, the work’s failure to excite or surprise—or perhaps even to sustain the viewer’s interest for long—becomes an embodiment of art’s broader struggle to adequately account for and work with contemporary digital media image production. Again, this failure is not presented from a knowing position of critical superiority, nor is it couched in the armature of tragic lamentation. Instead, we are presented with something more empirical and plain, more akin to Lawrence Weiner than Jenny Holzer.
        Faced with a digital media ecosystem in which everything can and will be subsumed and circulated as content, the withdrawal of art’s potential—to be formally or conceptually novel—within the shelter of disappointment has a certain logic and pathos. Nevertheless, disappointment can only be a minor aesthetic category; lacking the energy of shock, or the aggression of frustration, disappointment is easier to overlook or dismiss. As such, while asking the viewer to linger with art’s disappointingly marginal role in today’s culture makes sense, and is perhaps necessary, the question of whether the viewer can productively sit with such disappointment remains uncertain.

Gemma Weston, WITNESSING,  _____g.s, 6–22 March 2026.

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Footnote:

1. On 18 April 2026, thousands gathered at Grow Your Own (2011), a public sculpture by James Angus, commonly referred to as ‘the cactus’, for a ‘Worship the Cactus’ event organised by Bradley Innes, the Instagrammer behind @churchofthecactus.

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Header images: Gemma Weston, WITNESSING, at _____g.s. Photography by Wayne Lim @waaaaayne_