Benjamin Schonken

My research is entitled Am I Still Paying Attention? Overlapping Media Consumption in the Post-Internet Age, and combines methods of autoethnography with practice to explore how audiences consume media simultaneously and sporadically. I aim to deconstruct the myth of normative attention in both academia and film-watching, and explore how technology has affected the perceived artistic value, exhibition and popularity of various cultural objects.

Since starting my dissertation last October, I have downloaded every film, Instagram post, song and TikTok that I have seen or liked. My final film installation presents this digital archive using over 800 synchronous screen-segments - alongside screen recordings and audio transcripts of my own writing - to literally overlap my work with that which distracted me while researching it.