Fornieles’s practice explores the ways that the virtual world impacts upon the physical realm and vice versa […] His métier is what he calls the ‘fluidity between offline and online realities’. Fornieles has characterized his works as ‘content-generating machines’, mirroring the social networks that are among his tools. […] Alluding to the filmic origins of the performance, Fornieles has observed that the excitement of the work lies in its unpredictability: ‘there’s no way you can press pause or reverse’. Systems become entropic. Plans morph and break down. Freeman Dyson once wrote in my little notebook: ‘Be surprised’, while Douglas Coupland told me: ‘The future is homework’. Perhaps, with Ed Fornieles, we might say that the future lies somewhere between homework and surprise.

– Hans Ulrich Obrist, Theater Basel, 2012

Ed Fornieles’ new Associations series together images based on formal and conceptual associations. Using various internet search tools, Fornieles relates his process to ‘the zone’ or ‘flow state’ – a mental state connected both to the creative act as well as compulsive behaviour – which many social media companies aim to provoke in the user as a form of captivating their attention and making them pliable to suggestion and direction. The associations reveal fragments of an inner psyche and the unclear distinctions between its fundamental drives and the social forces that have shaped it. At times conscious and considered, at others trance-like, intuitive, and unthinking, the strings of association speak at once of subjectivities, individual and collective, the networked condition of contemporary images, and the inseparability of the two.

Fornieles' current solo exhibition, Associations, is on view at Carlos/Ishikawa until 29 May.