LINN PHYLLIS SEEGER MAKES THE INTERNET TANGIBLE: 'TRUE IDLE' AT SHIPTON GALLERY
- Lottie Hughes
- 7 hours ago
- 3 min read
Spilling out from functionality, always surpassing its primary use as transport, a car contains multitudes. In the most expansive use of the word, cars move us. Linn Phyllis Seeger’s exhibition true idle, which ran until April 4th, at Shipton Gallery, takes this excess as its premise.
Linn Phyllis Seeger's video-sculptures are assemblages of car parts and screens playing footage from the road. Her three forms lean, mirror, and balance. Structurally, the sculptures felt on edge, momentarily held together before their communion might be disrupted, or taken apart.
Images and photography courtesy of gallery and artist.
In her essay for the exhibition, Arianna Caserta states Seeger’s works are preoccupied with “the emotional fabric of the internet.” Before the works, this was most felt in her films and the differences flowing between them. The footage inside her sculptures comes from different sources: reels from Seeger’s Instagram archive all taken from the passenger seat, screen recordings of car gameplay, and cuts from traffic cameras. These differences capture what felt like an integral premise of the exhibition: that at its core, technology is amorphous. It can be hardware, distant observer, and wrapped up with our own impulses and desires. And, we oscillate between being avoidant and anxiously attached to it.
Photography courtesy of gallery .
In the sculpture Concessions (2026), a screen’s surface is cracked. Originally this was an accident, then incorporated into the show by Seeger. Via the splintered screen, I am reminded of the velocity these spare car parts were meant to be exposed to. Of the movement which won’t happen or has ceased to, made static inside sculpture, generating what Seeger names as a "restlessness".
In its anonymity, the traffic camera in Concessions felt romantic. Unexpectedly so. Capturing a route the artist has been driven on in the past. Here, tech feels serendipitous and warm. In Leaning Forward to Look Up (2026), the sunsets from Seeger’s Instagram archive evoked my own diaristic impulses, and maybe probably, everyone else’s? This did not come off as a denouncing or prescriptive position. It felt more like lyrical gesture. Grappling with the percolating ways memory and romance can be mediated by the user when their medium is owned and monopolised.
Photography courtesy of gallery and artist.
Running through true idle is Seeger’s ongoing inter-disciplinary research into digital infrastructures, subjectivity and affect. We are familiar with the origins of the internet, and its worn out associations with immaterial movements such as surfing, and later on, scrolling. The world at your fingertips via the information superhighway. Seeger’s hard-bodied sculptures reveal these metaphors and their utopian foundations to be more complex. Far more enmeshed with the user and surrounding infrastructures. The works allude to what Ryan S Jeffery argues in his 2025 essay for Do Not Research, “the myth of weightless cloud computing [has become] vaporised.” Such evocations accumulate between the works, in a gnawing slow-burn.
Finally, the video embedded in the sculpture, Longer Windows of Opportunity (2026), captures the stifled movement of a car in a video game. We only see the top of the car and a fraction of the surrounding pixelated landscape. The seamless mobility of being online is made idle, routeless; a distillation of a familiar feeling.
Lottie Hughes is a writer based in South London. Recent texts by her can be found in Polyester Zine and In-Jest Magazine. She also writes and does research for galleries.
