A new UK doomscrolling exhibition at Focal Point Gallery in Southend-on-Sea, England, examines why people struggle to log off and offers visitors a physical space to practice doing so. The show, titled “Compulsory Continuous Connectedness: Rest in a Networked World,” features work from artists Helen Cammock, Gad el Rab and Sinders, according to The Art Newspaper.
The exhibition takes its name from a term coined by media scholar Ludmilla Lupinacci, who uses it to describe the modern condition of being perpetually online and the near impossibility of fully logging off, The Art Newspaper reported.
The Main Development
The show is split across two galleries at Focal Point Gallery. One space directly confronts the anxieties and pressures tied to social media use. The other serves as a counter-narrative, built around the experience of stepping away from screens.
Visitors are encouraged to remain phone-free while moving through the second gallery, according to The Art Newspaper. That space draws on “soft fascination,” a concept from Attention Restoration Theory developed by environmental psychologists Rachel Kaplan and Stephen Kaplan in 1989. The theory holds that gentle, effortless attention allows the brain to rest and recover.
Cammock’s piece “They Call It Idlewild,” created in 2018, extends from the gallery into the entrance of the building. The work reflects on the tension between doing nothing and what the exhibition calls compulsory continuous connectedness.
What It Means For Visitors
The exhibition grew out of a long-running collaboration between Gad el Rab and Sinders, who have worked together since 2019. The pair completed a residency at Delfina Foundation called Science_technology_society, which explored the links between social media, technology and mental health, per The Art Newspaper.
Inês Costa, a curator at Focal Point Gallery, met Gad el Rab and Sinders during that residency. The connection formed there led directly to the current exhibition, according to the outlet.
Sinders also serves as executive director and co-founder of Convocation Research + Design, a civil society organization that advocates for privacy and security as human rights. The group studies how technology is built, how certain designs facilitate harm, and works alongside people developing internet privacy tools.
Background And Context
The exhibition arrives amid broader public conversation about the toll of constant online engagement. One voice cited in the project described encountering the most severe outcomes of that toll firsthand: “I get to see the extreme cases, the 1% where continuous connectedness can have a devastating impact on people’s lives and their families,” according to The Art Newspaper.
That framing shapes the exhibition’s approach of pairing critique with an alternative. Rather than simply cataloging the harms of compulsive scrolling, the Focal Point Gallery show builds a parallel space meant to demonstrate what disengagement can feel like in practice.
What’s Next
Focal Point Gallery has not released further details on how long “Compulsory Continuous Connectedness: Rest in a Networked World” will remain on view. Visitors in Southend-on-Sea can currently experience both galleries, moving from the exhibition’s critique of digital compulsion into its phone-free counterpoint built around rest and attention.
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