108 x 140mm, 32 pages, risograph printed, bound down two edges meaning you must tear it open to read, 2024

Everyday the internet evolves. Millions of images are uploaded, shared, and forgotten. RIP THE NET aims to highlight the absurdity of how we churn through digital information.

When something is printed and published it seems to gain an implicit value, so RIP THE NET plays off that by being bound to be destroyed. It is a publication that must be ripped to be read.

By forcing readers to consciously destroy the pages I want to create a discomfort, and give them only one chance to read the book in its original form. People often asked me multiple times if I was sure about ripping it, despite the fact that it was built to be broken; and I’m sure most readers would have no qualms deleting the actual content if it was on their computer.

The experience of reading RIP THE NET was designed to be similar to social media, where you can see something and all of a sudden it’s gone, impossible to find again. Or how dating apps, TikTok, and Instagram Reels keep you hooked by hiding what comes next, encouraging you to keep scrolling.

Using images from LAION-400M, a dataset of 400 million images scraped and downloaded from across the internet, I tried to find ‘digital detritus': content that is outdated, abandoned, or unlikely to be seen again by other humans. And yet this same content is being used to train AI models and provides the basis for large-scale internet research. 

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