Anyone who has not yet experienced digital information overload should try standing in front of the artwork Present Shock II. Installed outside the Melbourne Town Hall for the second year of the city's arts-technology festival, Now or Never, it is a board of statistics like you have never seen before - an ever-changing digital sculpture with no end or beginning. From the number of stars being born in the observable universe, to how many Instagram uploads are taking place right at that moment, it is mind-blowing real-time information .
.. and lots of it.
But how much of it can be relied upon? The numbers - along with a news feed - are presented as fact but are impossible to verify. "It's a reflection of this post-truth world that we're trying to navigate right now," artist Matt Clark told AAP. "It's full of humour, confusion, and some quite serious news topics.
"It's essentially looking at how we're exposed to all of this stuff on a daily basis and our brains are perhaps not wired for this kind of consumption of information." Clark is the co-founder of the London collective United Visual Artists, which started in 2003 and specialises in tech artworks. Present Shock II references the futurist Alvin Toffler's 1970 book Future Shock, with its forecast of a world up-ended by rapid technological change.
With a discomfiting soundtrack designed by Massive Attack's Robert Del Naja, the artwork is also a homage to United Visual Artists' very first project, an installation for Massive At.