Daniel Ellison

Contemporary writing technologies and conventions form the framework for my practice. I look to contemporary poetry and literature to develop systems and restraints for shaping linguistic material I source online. I treat making work as an exercise in information management, and view mine as an exercise situated in language. My current work repurposes content from the online news media which, in the screen-distracted internet age, have become a constant source of information and misinformation. The info/misinfo paradox that often reveals itself in the news, highlights the intrinsic differences between language, meaning, information and truth. By appropriating select linguistic material (headlines) from these sources, I attempt to examine the presence of stupidity and the sublime as affects in both the content and delivery mechanisms of online publishing platforms - specifically, Twitter. Cultural theorist Sianne Ngai calls the combination of these affects Stuplimity, which arrives via ‘comic exhaustion’ and leads to a desensitisation of an audience.