Short lived experience/ Late night scrolling

2024
90x200cm
Liljevalchs Vårsalong

Liv Strömquist is a comic artist, and this artwork was created in collaboration with her assistant, textile artist Lovisa Axén. The piece is a quilt composed of drawings made by Liv – after Liv drew the images on paper, Lovisa transferred them onto the textile. The images are traced screenshots of things that appeared on Liv’s phone during the spring and summer of 2023. The artwork is titled “Late Night Scrolling / Short Lived Experience.”

The term “Short Lived Experience” is borrowed from the sociologist Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, who writes about how our perception of time in the screen-based society transforms into a kind of eternal present filled with short-lived experiences (of, for example, joy, fear, or anger).
Komporozos-Athanasiou writes about this:
“As we turn to smartphones to navigate all aspects of everyday life – from travel and shopping to work and social connection – we find ourselves adrift, suspended over oceans of data that are produced, exchanged, and processed at previously unimaginable speeds. Yet, while information abundance yields enormous fortunes in Silicon Valley and Zhongguancun, it sows befuddlement for most of us, our routine experiences of the world increasingly unfold through complex technologies, whose inner workings are impenetrable.”
The artwork seeks to reflect a contemporary experience of the “short-lived experiences” that scrolling on a phone entails, while contrasting them with the slow and enduring nature of textile craftsmanship.