All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace #42

In a world where 10 billion screens outnumber people, entire cultures are shifting from producing goods to fabricating content for others to consume. We have unwittingly become workers in this giant factory, endlessly manufacturing and consuming the digital realities that entrap us.

All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, the new collection by Alkan Avcıoğlu, critiques the dehumanizing effects of technology by portraying how we are drowning in screens. The series blurs the lines between user and producer, freedom and enslavement – creating a world that is plausible yet doesn't make sense, mirroring the chaotic absurdity of the post-truth era.

Taking its title from the 1967 Richard Brautigan poem (later used by Adam Curtis' docuseries), the collection evokes the scale and orderliness of mass production by revisiting the visual language of industrial photography and artists such as Burtynsky and Gursky, creating an allegorical update for an era dominated by data and screens. By transforming the digital consumer into a factory worker, the collection metaphorically depicts this new form of secret labor that merges creation and consumption. Each piece underscores how technology, rather than liberating us, has become a tool for control and entrapment.