SMAP (Severe Mental Alienation Procedure)

Digital Film,2'26", Installation, 2022

S.M.A.P. is a video installation that delves into the psychological fragmentation and overstimulation of contemporary digital existence. The title — a recursive anagram of SPAM — reframes the idea of unwanted information as a procedural state: a systemic intrusion into perception, memory, and mental clarity.

At its core, the piece presents a looping image of a girl, subtly glitching at irregular intervals — a visual metaphor for the erosion of identity under the constant interference of the digital sphere. This image is accompanied by an unsettling soundscape: distorted recordings of actual Chinese-language auditory spam received on the artist’s mobile phone. The relentless flood of these messages — sometimes numbering in the hundreds — produces a numbing repetition that frustrates, exhausts, and slowly disorients the mind. It becomes a form of low-grade psychic abrasion, a persistent intrusion that pushes the psyche toward alienation.

These once-functional messages have been stretched, twisted, and rendered unfamiliar, echoing the dissonance between communication and comprehension, between presence and intrusion. The artist’s act of distortion becomes both an aesthetic transformation and a gesture of resistance — a way to reclaim the noise that would otherwise colonize personal mental space.

The projected image is displayed on a stack of old metal boxes once used to store medication, suggesting that this repetitive sonic intrusion functions like a warped form of treatment — an uneasy remedy for an already alienated mind.

S.M.A.P. invites viewers to inhabit a space where noise overtakes signal, and the boundaries between self and world begin to dissolve. It is a portrait of technological noise as a psychological condition — not mere background static, but an active force of alienation.