Signs of the Times

Signs of the Times is a video series created by collecting a large amount of headlines from Reddit, and then organizing them into related groupings. The purpose is to identify meta-trends in the headlines in order to “divine” the future through doomscrolling.

For several hours per day, over the course of several weeks, I would scroll with intention. I took screenshots of every piece of “bad news” I came across, and saved them into approximately twenty folders organized by theme.

The collection process finally ended when I began having regular panic attacks at the end of each day, and was forced to admit I had reached my limit.

The themes were ultimately whittled down to the strongest three, Economic Collapse, World War III, and the Point of No Return.

The materials were collaged into long files, then animated with Adobe software. On top of each scrolling feed, the theme of the grouping is layered in large “cut-out” letters, which, when viewed over time with sufficient motivation, will eventually reveal their message.