NoNoNoMoreLessPlease

Studio 207 · 21 November, 9:00pm - 11:00pm

We are told digital tools are emancipatory—everyone can create now. But couldn’t people always create? What if what changed is not capability but compulsion. Artists are caught in an attention economy that demands constant production, endless content, relentless creation for platforms we never chose but cannot escape. The velocity of production has become violence. The tools that promised liberation have become instruments of exhaustion.

I have created hundreds of digital artworks—images, videos, experiences—competing in an endless race for attention, for visibility, for survival in an algorithmic landscape that devours everything and remembers nothing. This accumulation has become baggage. Each piece is another weight, another expectation demanding I continue, produce, create, compete.

I feel I cannot create anymore. I want to destroy first.

We are living in times where we are bombarded hourly with destruction—through war, through the decay of social living situations, through the dissolving of human connection replaced by interfaces and metrics. We watch institutions crumble in real-time on our screens. We witness the erosion of community, the collapse of shared reality, the fragmentation of attention itself. Destruction is not theoretical—it is the texture of our daily experience.

So why do we keep creating? Why do we add more noise to the chaos?

This performance wants to raise the questions: What if the real act of creation in these times is destruction? What if reduction, not addition, is the only path back to creativity and curiosity?

Inspired by Gustav Metzger’s auto-destructive art—art that contains within itself the agent of its own destruction—and the punk ethos of Ton Steine Scherben’s “Mach kaputt was euch kaputt macht” (Destroy what destroys you), I will live code the destruction of my own in the past created digital artworks. Using a custom Python/Pygame environment I will destroy the structure of my images by using recursive deletion algorithms inspired by Conway’s Game of Life, but inverted—where cells don’t grow and decay, where patterns don’t emerge but dissolve, where my images die according to their own internal logic. This is destruction as system, as process, as ritual.

This performance is also a confrontation with my own fears.

As an artist, I am terrified of deletion. Every file saved is a small act of preservation against forgetting, against irrelevance, against the void. We hoard our work like a defense mechanism—proof that we existed, that we made something, that our time wasn’t wasted. The delete key is a threshold we rarely cross. Even failed experiments, abandoned sketches, embarrassing early work—we keep it all. Not because it has value, but because deleting feels like erasing part of ourselves.

But this fear has become a prison. The archive weighs on me. It’s proof of labor in a system that demands we constantly prove ourselves. Each file is a tiny hostage: “Don’t delete me, you might need me, what if this was important, what if you regret it?”

This performance forces me to face that fear directly. To sit with the discomfort of watching my own work disappear. To question why deletion feels like violence against myself. To ask what I’m actually afraid of—is it losing the work, or losing the proof that I worked? Is it about the art, or about the metrics, the portfolio, the performance of being productive?

This is not nihilism. This is an attempt to find a way for mental survival.

This is an attempt at freedom—to clear the baggage, to empty the cache, to delete the archive. To confront what it means to make something and then unmake it. To ask whether we need less, not more. To question whether preservation is always valuable, whether accumulation is always progress, whether creation is always the answer.

Maybe destruction is the artwork itself. Maybe the only way forward is to burn it all down and start from nothing. Maybe we need to make space—literal and psychological—before we can see clearly again, before we can create from genuine curiosity rather than compulsion, before we can remember why we started making things in the first place.

This performance is a clearing. A purging. A refusal to add more to a world already drowning in content.

No. No more. Less, please.

---