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 featured works 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 this 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, and Qualeasha Wood’s tapestries examine digital overconsumption, glitch and the warping of selfhood under digital platform pressures and Nina Davies’s film and installation questions the body’s relationship to its own image under platform systems. Together these artists expose the consequences of hyperconnectivity, not as personal failures of self-control but structural issues, designed into our daily lives.

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 (DMN). The DMN is a series of neural connections said to be active during wakeful rest: times of daydreaming and mind wandering but not sleep. These connections are essential for creativity and reflection, but the pervasive demands of our ‘plugged in’ lives leave little space to achieve them. 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, inviting visitors to activate the DMN and imagine alternative futures, creative outputs or unlock memories. Gallery 2 is transformed into a carpeted, low-lit room with soft communal seating, wall prompts drawing on neuroscientific research, and two audio pods playing bespoke, ASMR-registered sound pieces. A kinetic sculpture made in collaboration with Essex-based artist Mike McShane and ceramicist Hayley Summers drops keys onto a ceramic plate at set intervals. The sound interrupts the meditative state, drawing listeners back into the shared space and away from sleep, a reference to a method used by historical inventors, writers and artists to access the hypnagogic creative state at the edge of consciousness.

Helen Cammock’s video work They Call It Idlewild (2020), also plays in the space. Cammock explores the politics of ‘doing nothing’ Thinking of idleness as a form of meditation, the artist asks what the physical and emotional costs of neoliberal hyper-productivity are, and who might be particularly affected by them. This body of work extends into the gallery’s foyer where two screenprints allude to rituals of aimlessness such as wandering or looking without purpose, reclaimed as meditative conditions for creative and critical thinking.

This exhibition opens at a moment of acute policy attention: the announcement of a social media ban for under 16s and the government’s Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill have put social media harms and youth mental health at the centre of public debate. Compulsory Continuous Connectedness: rest in a networked world offers a space for audiences to reflect and consider what collective agency might look like in response to the consequences of our ever-increasing online life.