DOOMSCROLL DREAMACHINE

DOOMSCROLL DREAMACHINE reframes Gysin’s flicker device through compulsions of the infinite scroll.

Projected feeds entrain vision into flicker-states, turning doomscrolling into altered-state technology. Even our most troubling digital habits can be transformed into new ways of seeing and experiencing the present.

DOOMSCROLL DREAMACHINE was commissioned by NCM in 2025.

A UV-printed canvas, mounted as a scroll with aluminium finials, operates a speculative timeline: cut-up and fold-in logics bleeding through broadcast, network, and algorithm until they crystallize as the present entrainment loop. The format recalls the suspended banner, collapsing media archaeology into patterned surfaces.

A soundtrack of pulses and distorted traces of online audio carries the signal further, oscillating between overload and drift. Screen, canvas and sound align as a ritual protocol—rendering doomscrolling not simply as pathology, but an involuntary dream-machine, where text, image and frequency conspire to rewrite perception.

UV-printed canvas with aluminium finials, painted 3D-printed steel sculpture with volumetric LED fans, 4-channel generative soundtrack. Sound design: Mervin Wong. Graphic design: Darius Ou. Fabrication: Red Orchid 99

Brandon Tay is a Singapore-born, Shanghai-based artist working across sculpture, installation, moving image, and speculative systems. His practice explores how myth, technology, and historical knowledge become entangled through interfaces, infrastructures, and symbolic forms. Drawing on sources that range from scientific revelation and occult traditions to computational logics and vernacular media, he builds works that stage reality as recursive, unstable, and continually rewritten.

Working through biomorphic sculpture, simulation, text, and networked imagery, Tay creates environments that blur the line between system and symbol, archaeology and speculation. His work often examines how belief is encoded in technical systems, how memory is shaped by media, and how irrational structures persist within modern regimes of reason.Tay has exhibited individually and collaboratively at platforms including the Singapore Biennale, transmediale, and the National Communication Museum (Naarm), among others.