Members of our group foraged for stones ranging in size from 5x5 cm to 20x20 cm. Participants then crafted humorous and fictitious pieces of information to be laser-etched onto the stones, which were subsequently placed back into the world. Each participant was responsible for 3-4 stones. The catalysts for this project were considering how information (and of course, misinformation) saturates all aspects of our modern world and the ways in which we either succumb, resist, or attempt to verify it. Traditionally, there has been a notion of something being “set in stone” where an authority has determined something as "truth," creating monuments and artefacts for current and future peoples to acknowledge this "truth." The so-called era of "post-truth" has stripped away the essence of truth as a singular authority with the advent of the internet. Now the truth can be spoken by many voices, we create our own “monuments to truth” in cyberspace, and with this come questions of misinformation, how it harms people, and how we have lost our way.
However, is this true? Is this period unique or even new? In his book on the Anglo-Saxons, Marc Morris points out many “truths” about English history as misinformation[1]. Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij suggests that we have only been monitoring the effects of information on political opinion in recent decades. While the data do corollate to concerns about contemporary attitudes to information, this does not prove that there ever was a “golden age of truth”[2]. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems indisputable that social media had a substantial effect on psychological and mental health[3], but was this due to its existence, or people’s relationship with the information they were seeing?
Through our project, we are satirizing how people receive information/misinformation, how they determine it to be true, and how they spread it. Each of us takes something from the world, and using technology, etches an absurd truth and releases it back into the world, creating our own monument or artefact to be discovered and shared. We see this as a gentle intervention, one that we hope will provoke some amusement, but also some thoughts around our individual relationships with the information surrounding us in this contemporary landscape.
[1] Marc Morris, The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England (London: Cornerstone Digital, 2021).
[2] Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij, ‘Do We Live in a “Post-Truth” Era?’, Political Studies, 71.2 (2023), 501–17 <https://doi.org/10.1177/00323217211026427>.
[3] Mesfin Esayas Lelisho and others, ‘The Negative Impact of Social Media during COVID-19 Pandemic’, Trends in Psychology, 31.1 (2022), 123–42 <https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-022-00192-5>.
