Documentation: Cassie Sullivan and Andrew Wilson

Post-Cringe 2023, LED neon, commissioned for Hobart Current Biennial 2023, exhibited again at MONA FOMA 2024.

 

In an era saturated with digital discourse, Post-Cringe serves as an emblematic call to embrace cringe as a neo-tradition. It prompts us to transcend the awkward and uncomfortable moments that often plague our digital realities. It challenges the pervasive culture of irony-pilled ridicule, urging us towards an approach of radical open-source acceptance.

 

Digital updates modify contemporary human behaviour, continuing the cultural impacts caused by past developments in typographical and printing technologies.

Recreating internet slang in Gothic script; a font historically disparaged and associated with post-classical Medieval stagnancy - yet retroactively adored and fetishized, highlights the profound influence of technology on consciousness and the cycle of trends through time.

 

Once a descriptor of abject shame, the term ‘cringe’ has resurfaced with a recontextualising pre-fix. Commenting, posting, typing ‘Post-Cringe’ involves an admission by association to cringe. Hyper-referential content viewed and reposted through a blue lit screen soothingly cradles us into the comfortably de-sensitised embrace we know as Post-Cringe.

 

Electric-blue LED light conjures a cyberpunk sci-fi haze in mimesis of chemical neon light. Symbolic of the digital realm, blue light is used in screens, therapy devices, and software branding. Possessing such multi-hyphenate limbic-hacking reach, this social-media-LED-interFace-mask radiation renders Post-Cringe a nebulous sigil of our time.

 

 

Post-Cringe is self-care for the online self.

 

 

Beneath the blue light, repeat this affirmation: I am post-cringe, and I post cringe.