deFrag🌸popUp
Since 2015, technological wellness agency RLX:tech has been designing contemplative content and meditative experiences to help you manage your networked life. Our ‘deFrag🌸popUp’ offering is a temporary wellness experience designed for corporations, using augmented reality (AR) and guided meditations to help improve staff productivity. Caring businesses can commission us to install our popup on site, helping you to you to meet your wellbeing KPIs, contain distraction and improve productivity. We offer a menu of 4 meditations to select from: ‘Context Collapse’ on making peace with the many versions of your online self; ‘Attentive Choices’ on finding ways to attune thoughtfully to endless content, ‘Need 2 Know’ encouraging you to embrace unknowing, and ‘Inbox Anxiety’ with reassurances on the impossibility of inbox zero. These meditations can be enjoyed via our free smartphone app. We install a bespoke vinyl print with interactive AR markers customised to your spatial specifications. These are activated through our app, and audiences are encouraged to lay down on our artisan yoga mats to enjoy the meditation they need. Our vinyl design and meditations also contain links to our web shop, enabling the purchase of exciting wellness products to continue your experience at home.
The social effects of digital materials like apps are often downplayed due to metaphors of immateriality: clouds, webs and nets. In light of this, deFrag🌸popUp explores a maximal aesthetic: scaling up digital detritus like emoji, chat bubbles and interface elements to draw attention to their material effects in the physical world. The RLX:tech agency is a speculative construct designed to critique the supply-chain mentality of the wellness industry where wellbeing is the job of the individual rather than the systems that produce unease and distress. Many AR experiences thru Snap and Meta trade on attention extraction and are designed to be decorative, short and shareable. deFrag🌸popUp questions this through installation design with ‘slow’ somatic AR experiences that can’t be shared. These ways of engaging with AR content centres first person, ephemeral experience over sharable, algorithmically motivated encounters. The meditations and their messages are designed to genuinely support those struggling with distraction and network anxiety; at the same time, QR codes and prompts to purchase products through curated wellness edits drag you back into your screen. The work of RLX:tech oscillates between sincerity and satire to reflect the contradictory role devices can play in wellbeing. We may rely on them for meditation apps, to mitigate loneliness and to find ways to be included – but of course, they can modulate our attention into addictive loops.
deFrag🌸popUp is an installation of an interactive 11m x 3m graphic, 6 yoga mats and an augmented reality app. The graphic is activated by the app to play one of 4 guided meditations. I made all of the elements in this project - graphic, app, mats, meditations and have developed new practices for the production and testing of a large format interactive image. The vinyl print is super sharp and extremely detailed. By bulding my own app, the encounter was designed to be slow and corporeal, individual and unshareable - unable to be co-opted by algorithmic practices. The interface design was experimental and driven by processes of intuition and expression as opposed to prevalent design patterns that centre usability.
deFrag🌸popUp was a new work commission from the University of QLD Art Museum for ‘Conflict In My Outlook Part 2: Don’t Be Evil’, curated by Anna Briers, which featured work from 11 international artists. It was on display from July 30 2021 - January 2022. The gallery installation photos are by Louis Lim, process and screenshots are my images.
Back to Recent Projects
The social effects of digital materials like apps are often downplayed due to metaphors of immateriality: clouds, webs and nets. In light of this, deFrag🌸popUp explores a maximal aesthetic: scaling up digital detritus like emoji, chat bubbles and interface elements to draw attention to their material effects in the physical world. The RLX:tech agency is a speculative construct designed to critique the supply-chain mentality of the wellness industry where wellbeing is the job of the individual rather than the systems that produce unease and distress. Many AR experiences thru Snap and Meta trade on attention extraction and are designed to be decorative, short and shareable. deFrag🌸popUp questions this through installation design with ‘slow’ somatic AR experiences that can’t be shared. These ways of engaging with AR content centres first person, ephemeral experience over sharable, algorithmically motivated encounters. The meditations and their messages are designed to genuinely support those struggling with distraction and network anxiety; at the same time, QR codes and prompts to purchase products through curated wellness edits drag you back into your screen. The work of RLX:tech oscillates between sincerity and satire to reflect the contradictory role devices can play in wellbeing. We may rely on them for meditation apps, to mitigate loneliness and to find ways to be included – but of course, they can modulate our attention into addictive loops.
deFrag🌸popUp is an installation of an interactive 11m x 3m graphic, 6 yoga mats and an augmented reality app. The graphic is activated by the app to play one of 4 guided meditations. I made all of the elements in this project - graphic, app, mats, meditations and have developed new practices for the production and testing of a large format interactive image. The vinyl print is super sharp and extremely detailed. By bulding my own app, the encounter was designed to be slow and corporeal, individual and unshareable - unable to be co-opted by algorithmic practices. The interface design was experimental and driven by processes of intuition and expression as opposed to prevalent design patterns that centre usability.
deFrag🌸popUp was a new work commission from the University of QLD Art Museum for ‘Conflict In My Outlook Part 2: Don’t Be Evil’, curated by Anna Briers, which featured work from 11 international artists. It was on display from July 30 2021 - January 2022. The gallery installation photos are by Louis Lim, process and screenshots are my images.
Back to Recent Projects
