Believe me was commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2017.
The work references the familiar sight of a mobile phone's broken screen by overlaying the visual effect of cracks on a series of images that can be manipulated by the viewer and loaded successively by refreshing the browser. Using the seemingly damaged screen as a central metaphor, Believe me evokes the distortions that digital technologies impose on our experience of the world and each other. Failed or failing pixels change the colors, spaces, and meanings of the project's imagery which is politically charged in some cases, and in others captures the vernacular of the online environment through familiar interface elements or Internet folklore. The slightly glitched, broken, readable yet abstracted imagery of Believe me — the most often used two words by Donald Trump according to sociolinguistics Jennifer Sclafani's analysis for CNN — questions the status of reality as it is mediated through our screens in a fake news and post-truth environment.
See the full exhibtion here
