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# Compulsory Continuous Connectedness
- URL: https://www.protein.xyz/compulsory-continuous-connectedness/
- Published: 2026-10-01T08:30:10.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T08:30:09.000Z
- Description: A new exhibition at Focal Point Gallery, led by Caroline Sinders and Romy Gad el Rab, explores rest as resistance.
- Author: Protein
- Tags: Seeds

*Compulsory Continuous Connectedness: Rest in a Networked World* is an exhibition at Southend-on-Sea’s [Focal Point Gallery](https://www.fpg.org.uk/?ref=protein.xyz), which grapples with the chasm digital platforms create between ourselves and one another. Led by a new commission and research from Caroline Sinders and Romy Gad el Rab, the exhibition confronts these cracks, and prompts visitors to consider the cost of, and solutions to, incessant connectivity. 

Sinders and Gad el Rab bring a unique perspective, applying their experience across human rights technology and clinical research in technology addiction. They address the dark underbelly of these digital systems, and the power structures that feed them. Gad el Rab is a psychiatrist working in the NHS’s first centre for internet gaming disorders, and is former founding co-chair of the Royal College of Psychiatrists Digital Special Interest Group. Sinders’ work focuses on intersectional justice, design, policy, and the disproportionate harm technology has on marginalised groups. Between them, their work has been shown at the Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Delfina Foundation, Somerset House, V&A and MoMA. 

‘Our goal is not to demonise technology. Social media can be a lifeline for marginalised communities and technology is a part of our collective social infrastructure’, Sinders explains. As the recent discourse on dumb phones might have you believe, the answer is not avoiding tech altogether and burying your head in the sand. Not everyone is lucky enough to be able to just log off, as Sophia Epstein points out in the SEED [Ambiguity Maxxing](https://www.protein.xyz/ambiguity-maxxing/), ‘It also takes a certain amount of privilege to make yourself inaccessible.’ 

The exhibition’s title comes from media scholar Ludmila Lupinacci, who coined the term to describe our contemporary state of existing online. A relentless media feed forces us into a perpetual state of anticipation, and when we do detach ourselves, we’re often left feeling uneasy, anxious there’s a whole digital world out there that we’re missing out on. And so we return to our phones to soothe through endlessly searching. 

Sinders and Gad el Rab bring this overwhelming topic into sharp focus, presenting work by Helen Cammock, Nina Davies, Rebecca Moccia, Salvatore Vitale and Qualeasha Wood that distils the excessive yet isolating nature of networked media. 

The exhibition also features the work of young people aged 13 to 25 via the fantastically titled *It’s Giving Grey Matter.* In a series of workshops, run in partnership with Sophie Burrows of [Animating Education](https://www.animatingeducation.co.uk/?ref=protein.xyz) and curator Kim Davey, they created an animated film that looks at what it means – and feels – to grow up in such a disorientating environment. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/71/fc716215-5729-441a-bd07-e2b50bc413b1/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-30-at-18.37.34.png)

Qualeasha Wood, **a flaw in my code*, 2025 

In Gallery 1 hang Qualeasha Wood’s tapestries: a historical medium used to discuss contemporary subjects, and the tension between which amplifies the fragmentation of identity that online culture cultivates. Using a digital loom, Wood weaves images she’s collected from the internet and personal archive; glitching, abstracting and embellishing them. She often uses her own body as a subject to address the unstable spaces Black, female and queer bodies inhabit in both the digital and physical world. 

Nina Davies’ film and installation also probes how networked media impacts our agency and perception of our bodies. *Haters Will Say I’m Real* (2024) blends an uncanny conversation with footage of dancers revolving around their phone. Their movements are swift and precise, emulating edited videos in real time. Bodies primarily exist to perform, with flesh and bone flattened into entertainment. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/71/fc716215-5729-441a-bd07-e2b50bc413b1/content/images/2026/09/Haters-Will-Say-I-m-Real.jpg)

Nina Davies, **Haters Will Say I’m Real* (video still), 2024 

A whole host of products have emerged to help us curb our obsessive phone use: from the physical app-blocker Brick to the ‘operating system for attention’ Opal. But as Gad el Rab explains, ‘Narratives around digital detox and logging off put a lot of onuses on us as users or consumers. Social, legal and structural change is also needed.’ With this more empathic outlook, the exhibition suggests the remedy is not discipline, but dreaming.

When Sinders and Gad el Rab were investigating the harmful impacts of networked systems and social media, Gad el Rab was reminded of something she came across during her time as a clinical researcher. ‘Default Mode Network’ (DMN) is a brain network that activates when the brain is at wakeful rest: daydreaming. This area lights up when we think about ourselves, remember the past and imagine the future. As SEEDS [Passive Attack](https://www.protein.xyz/passive-attack/) and [Bringing Boredom Back](https://www.protein.xyz/bringing-boredom-back/) explore, we’re rarely permitted the chance to spend time in the DMN. Illuminating this area of the brain is at the heart of Sinders and Gad el Rab’s installation that occupies Gallery 2\. 

The carpeted floor and walls are both deep coral, with soft, brick-red seating curving around the kinetic sculpture made with Essex-based artist Mike McShane and ceramicist Hayley Summers. A set of keys dangles from a sleek metal sculpture, occasionally dropping onto powder-pink plates with a clatter, interrupting the meditative state that watching the slowly spinning arm evokes. Not only does the piece make visitors more aware of their attention – or lack thereof – but it also references a method historically employed by inventors, writers and artists to reach the hypnagogic state: a mental state that straddles consciousness and unconsciousness. Embracing this nothingness might be a challenge for visitors wired for productivity, as Sinders says, ‘to let themselves daydream without a specific goal.’ 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/71/fc716215-5729-441a-bd07-e2b50bc413b1/content/images/2026/09/IMG_9368-1.jpeg)

Installation by Caroline Sinders, Romy Gad el Rab, Mike McShane and Hayley Summers

‘I was reading Jonathan Crary’s book *24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep* (2013) and thinking about sleep as a resistance to capitalism’, Gad el Rab reflects while discussing the active rest the installation intends to bring about. Indeed, back in 2017 Netflix asserted that its competition was not other streaming platforms, but sleep. ‘You know, think about it, when you watch a show from Netflix and you get addicted to it, you stay up late at night. We’re competing with sleep, on the margin’, Reed Hastings, the company’s co-founder said on an earnings call.

Helen Cammock’s video work *They Call It Idlewild* (2020) plays against the rich walls, a colour which is somewhat suggestive of bodily organs. The space feels both corporeal and calming. Cammock's piece is particularly absorbing, inducing a lulling effect through its prolonged frames. Eyes gaze at stone walls, country roads and sturdy stems. Cammock’s poetic words run throughout, paying homage to writers such as Audre Lorde, Mary Oliver and James Joyce.

Two other sculptures occupy the space, and take the form of curved metal poles with giant acorn shapes hanging from them. They're reminiscent of the helmet hair dryers you’d find in mid-century beauty parlours. You can also place your head into them – in fact it’s encouraged. When you do, you’ll be surrounded by binaural beats created by [DJ Programma](https://www.instagram.com/djprogramma/?ref=protein.xyz). These beats allow the brain to tap into theta wave frequencies: the waves that naturally ripple through the brain when daydreaming, meditating or in the early stages of sleep. 

As Gad el Rab considers, ‘These rituals are not necessarily new; they are ancient ideas that modernity has forgotten. Many Eastern traditions identified such spiritual or mental states millennia ago, with current critical theory and neuroscience catching up: identifying the DMN gives language to something we have known about intuitively for a long time.’ 

*'Compulsory Continuous Connectedness: Rest in a Networked World' at Focal Point Gallery runs until Saturday 9th January 2027\.* 

| SEED       | #8449    |
| ---------- | -------- |
| DATE       | 01.10.26 |
| PLANTED BY | PROTEIN  |