Hopelessly distracted by you: Can we break our love affair with tech?

It’s hard to know where to look when you walk into Distraction, a new exhibition at the Science Gallery at the University of Melbourne. Which is rather the point.

“In the age of digital distraction, information overload, doomscrolling and decreasing attention spans are the new normal,” says gallery director Dr Ryan Jefferies. The exhibition is a response to that and asks: “How do we stay focused, filter out or switch off in an ever-growing global attention economy?”

Works big and small both mimic and critique the tropes of big tech, including computer games, “sock puppets”, tweets … even a wall of cat videos.

Curator Bern Hall developed the show with the input of a panel of young “sci-curious” advisers aged 15 to 25, some of whom did their final years of high school or first years of university in tech-dependent COVID isolation.

“They talked about how they had this feeling of being constantly plugged in, but feeling less connected than ever before, and wanting to find a way to steal that time and attention back,” she says.

Curator Bern Hall contemplates a “love shrine” dedicated to Astraion, a character from the videogame Baldur’s Gate 3.Credit: Justin McManus

Hall is not immune to the lure of digital distraction. Instead of working on her comic book art, the 30-year-old often succumbs to deep dives on Reddit.

There is, she believes, “a malicious kind of design going on” in digital media. “All the social apps, all the web interfaces we engage with, are intentionally designed through neuroscience to grab our attention and be addictive.” Her aim in the exhibition was to explore “the ways we can resist that”.

There are, she believes, both good and bad distractions.

“When we’ve been scrolling social media too long, it doesn’t feel good,” she says. And we instinctively know that’s a bad distraction.

The Epic Sock Puppet Theatre lays bare the workings of political manipulation on social media.Credit: Astrid Mulder

But sometimes, instead of focusing on the task at hand, our minds might wander in pursuit of “whimsical thoughts that just arrive, these creative impulses – and if we follow them through with a bit more intention, they could be leading us to somewhere better”.

In the world of internet distractions, cat videos hold a special place. And for artist Jen Valender, the question was: what do the cats themselves think of them?

Valender has previously worked with pythons, macaques, newborn calves and house flies. “I really am interested in how animals see the world,” she says. “I thought, ‘Someone’s got to do a cat video work, and that better be me.’”

In April, she flew to Japan to film semi-feral cats on Aoshima (aka Cat Island). “I had to find a gang of cats that hadn’t had exposure to screens before,” she explains.

She then showed the cats the footage, and filmed them as they watched it, mostly with haughty feline disdain, but occasionally with mild interest.

Her work features a grid of 81 cat videos. Squint and you can make out Valender in some of them, but not many.

Video of a cat watching video of itself forms part of Jen Valender’s Cat Island. Credit: Jen Valender

“I’m allergic to cats,” she says. “I get itchy, can’t breathe, runny nose, the works. So this was also an endurance performance for me.”

For American Laura Allcorn, our digital saturation demands a response.

“It’s time we steal our attention back – I think it’s a worthy cause,” says the creator of Pledge Drive for Attention, an installation that mimics the set of a telethon. “It’s been taken from us by apps and algorithms designed and curated to feed into whatever we’re interested in, and we know they’re profiting from this.”

Allcorn’s work invites visitors to take a pledge to substitute time currently spent scrolling for something more productive. A counter on the wall keeps track of the hours pledged, and a bell rings every time someone signs up.

She’s not anti-tech, just anti the way it has come to dominate our lives. “It’s a grey area, which is why we find so much tension around it,” she says. “Things can serve us and things can go too far.”

Like many of the contributors to the exhibition, Allcorn is convinced our relationship with digital media is altering the way our brains function.

“There’s evidence that our attention spans are shrinking in certain ways, we’re not engaging in the same ways we used to,” she says. “There’s something in how we live now that means we can’t sit with ourselves and boredom. And I think that is definitely rewiring our brains. It’s this need to be activated all the time.”

Digital media is all about ease – of access, of use, of immediacy. And in this “slick, frictionless world” we inhabit, being bored produces a sense of “friction that feels incredibly scratchy and horrible” to many of us.

“But I think we can reverse that, that we can return to the level of attention we once had,” Allcorn says. “Maybe I’m a hopeful, hopeless optimist around that, but I know I’ve restored my own attention.”

Distraction will be at Science Gallery Melbourne until May 2, 2026.

The Morning Edition newsletter is our guide to the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up here.