On Screens

About On Screens

A collection of essays exploring how our online identities effect our offline politics and desires, from an artist and critic Deborah Levy says is, “fast becoming one of our most important writers.”

As platforms constantly expect us to update and post, our status as ‘artists’ is often overlooked. The internet has become a world of appearances where aesthetics trump ethics, it is more important to gain likes than to be right. Power and punishment are enacted via aesthetic judgements.

With a light touch, On Screens asks serious questions about—and posits creative strategies in response to—the capitalized internet. Walsh, in particular, pays attention to the “minor,” often “feminized,” online affects—the like/heart/star of social media, the rage in outrage, celebrity envy, influencing— that have such fundamental effects on our identities, our politics, and our desires offline.

Through a series of scintillating essays that ask: what is a mother online? how has the contract between the author and their work changed? The dangers of the ‘cute’ personality, how people prepare for their death online; Walsh shows that the aesthetics that keep us tethered to the internet are also the means by which we can subvert or even take it over.