Britt Eklund is a contemporary visual artist whose practice examines the tension between digital culture and physical materials. Her work often combines image-based references, algorithmic processes, and handcrafted elements to explore how identity, memory, and social structures are mediated by technology.
Across installations, sculptures, and time-based projects, Eklund builds environments that question familiar tech interfaces and corporate design languages. By reworking screenshots, templates, and brand artifacts, she reveals hidden cultural assumptions embedded in everyday digital experiences.
| Name | Britt Eklund |
|---|---|
| Primary Medium | Mixed media, digital prints, sculpture, installation |
| Themes | Digital identity, platform labor, interface critique, intimacy and privacy |
| Context | Post-internet art, conceptual art, feminist technoculture |
Platform Aesthetics and Interface Critique
Eklund investigates how platforms shape visual culture and influence what becomes visible online. Her installations often reproduce familiar UI elements, such as timelines, feeds, and notification badges, to question how design choices steer behavior and emotional states. By isolating these components outside their native environments, she exposes the choreography of attention and data extraction underlying everyday use.
Materiality of Digital Images
From Screens to Sculpture
In works that translate pixels into physical form, Eklund employs resin, fabric, and layered substrates to test the boundary between image and object. These pieces highlight the discrepancies between on-screen representation and tangible presence, suggesting how digital images accumulate dust, glare, and distortion over time. The resulting works emphasize both the fragility and the persistence of digitally mediated experience.
Labor, Data, and Value
Platform Work and the Hidden Workforce
Several projects foreground the labor that sustains digital platforms, from content moderators to training-data annotators. By naming these contributors and integrating their working conditions into the aesthetic framework of her pieces, Eklund challenges narratives of frictionless automation. Viewers are invited to recognize how value is generated, extracted, and obscured within networked infrastructures.
Narratives of Identity and Memory
Eklund also engages with personal archives, social snapshots, and self-representational strategies to explore how digital tools reshape memory. Works in this vein examine how curated profiles and algorithmic recommendations influence the stories people tell about themselves. The result is an ongoing reflection on authenticity, performance, and the shifting boundaries between public and private life.
Key Takeaways and Practices
- Critique digital interface design as both aesthetic and economic system
- Translate screen-based elements into immersive physical environments
- Highlight invisible labor and data extraction in platform economies
- Explore how digital tools reshape identity, memory, and self-representation
- Use industrial materials alongside craft techniques to bridge digital and tactile
FAQ
Reader questions
How does Britt Eklund translate digital interfaces into physical installations?
She isolates interface components such as navigation bars, feeds, and notification badges, then reconstructs them at scale using industrial materials and craft techniques. This translation makes visible the design logic and material weight of normally invisible digital controls.
What role does labor play in her work?
Eklund highlights platform labor by documenting workers, workflows, and performance metrics associated with digital services. Her projects bring attention to the human costs behind seemingly immaculate automated systems.
How does she address privacy and intimacy in her practice?
She reworks screenshots and personal data traces to explore how platforms frame intimacy as a resource to be captured and monetized. The works reveal how shared images and conversations are transformed into tracked, stored, and repurposed content.
What materials are central to her sculptures and installations?
She frequently uses resin, molded plastics, digital prints on fabric, and modular supports that echo industrial and domestic furnishings. These materials bridge the aesthetic of corporate showrooms with the roughness of handmade construction.