United Bytes

Works in Larsen’s Pixelated Fabric series reflect on the role that social media played in the result of the 2016 US election.

United Bytes presents a US flag that has been 'pixelated' into thousands of tiny sharp-edged 'silos,' extruding from the flowing fabric. This represents Jan's view of the impact that social media has played in interrupting his home country's already-weak social fabric into 'silos' or 'echo chambers' of polarized opinion, 'facts,' and too often, falsehoods.

For Jan: “We in the States, and I think everyone everywhere, are still growing out of this era of ‘interruption,’ ‘atomization,’ or 'pixelization' of our natural social fabric by the early adoption of social media.  We’ll grow out of it and around it as we learn to moderate our engagement with the medium, and ‘take it with a grain of salt.’  We’re all learning to take the ‘news’ and ‘facts’ we read online with a dose of healthy skepticism. One of the casualties from our early adoption of the medium has been a weakening of our natural social fabric.”