Context Collapse

Context Collapse is a generative animation of an imaginary social network. Simulated users, or bots, or agents, all post, reply, quote, agree, argue, and delete messages. But we see none of their language — only their intensity. Each post is a coloured, textured speech bubble, sized and saturated by the heat of its content.

These bubbles tile edge to edge on the picture plane in an all-over composition, their timeline columns forming a grid that never quite resolves into modernism. Conversations (and non-conversations) nest their colours into radial figures as a topic spreads through the field, deletion removes those figures and collapses the composition as if they were never there. The speech bubble is a cartoon sign for speech with the speech removed, hosted inside the most austere structure abstraction has: the grid holding the comic.

With the words gone, colour is all that is left to indicate what people are saying, and each piece takes a palette that already meant something before the work adopted it. One piece takes the Progress Pride flag, setting the terms for the others. Read back through it, the pastels are not a mood and the checks are not decoration. They carry identities too, held at the same strength, asserted across the same surface. Given this, the work does not reduce fundamental identity to taste. Quite the opposite.

That is what the title names: the separate audiences in which a person holds different roles being flattened into one undifferentiated public. Here the grid is that flattening made literal: no channels, no rooms, just the figures of intensity that remain when every context is one.

The work is live and unbounded. It never stops, it never repeats, it cannot be seen in full. Not apocalyptic wallpaper; an anthropocene lock screen.