This project began in conversation with Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, a novel that orbits around memory, kinship, time, and pauses. Egan’s “goon,” the brute that robs her characters of youth and promise, becomes a metaphor for time itself. Egan said that “time is the stealth goon, the one you ignore because you are so busy worrying about the goons right in front of you.”

At a public talk, Egan posed a series of questions that remain central to my thinking: How has image culture shaped our inner lives? How has mass media and image culture changed our inner lives, our sense of who we are to ourselves, or has it? How our ubiquitous disembodied communication might mimic the gothic experience in which people are in remote places and there is this possibility of the supernatural all the time? What would a contemporary novel about time look like?

These questions resonate with my own experiences as someone shaped by the internet. They have become guideposts not just for this project, but for how I reflect on my generation’s relationship to time, technology, and the emotional infrastructures we build around them.

Building on Egan’s reflections, my research also explores how contemporary life—saturated by social media and digital platforms—has profoundly altered our psychological landscapes and identity formation. In 24/7, Jonathan Crary argues that digital capitalism seeks to capture every moment of our waking lives, transforming even our personal and private time into measurable units of productivity or consumption. Similarly, media theorist Byung-Chul Han, in his book The Burnout Society, describes how this perpetual state of digital connectedness and self-exploitation creates new forms of existential fatigue and anxiety, radically reshaping how we perceive our inner selves and our social existence.

On a personal level, my confidence has been deeply affected by social media. I used to find joy and fulfillment in simply being myself. Yet, within the queer community, I’ve found that social media amplifies a culture of constant comparison. We are often encouraged to measure ourselves against others: who looks better, who is more muscular, who has a more enviable relationship, who is constantly traveling or socializing.

Before social media became a central part of my daily life, these comparisons were far less frequent. Now, they seem almost unavoidable. Instead of enhancing my happiness or sense of belonging, this culture of comparison has made me hyper-aware of things I previously cared little about, leaving me anxious about inadequacies I never recognized before.

Numerous studies have indicated that social media significantly impacts people’s mental health, negatively influencing self-esteem, body image, and overall psychological well-being. The constant exposure to idealized representations of others often leaves individuals feeling inadequate, isolated, and insecure. Social media quietly turns our gaze outward, eroding the self-assurance and genuine satisfaction we might otherwise cultivate privately. From self-contained joy to externally validated anxiety, is precisely why I feel compelled to interrogate and visualize the emotional cycles and subtle violence embedded within the internet culture.

Social media offers us a new kind of Sisyphus. We scroll endlessly, consuming snapshots of other people’s lives, feeling our own lack by comparison. The algorithm tightens the loop, speeding up the rhythm of desire, failure, and repetition.
‍
In ancient Greek myth, Sisyphus was condemned to push a rock uphill, only to watch it tumble back down. As Albert Camus observed, Sisyphus embodies the absurd hero, the one who persists in the face of meaninglessness: “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.”
‍
In modern society, we continually set and pursue milestones: graduating from university, securing a job, winning an award, but each achievement inevitably becomes a starting point for new aspirations. Like Sisyphus’s stone rolling back down the hill, every success signals the beginning of another struggle. One of the most troubling aspects of social media is that it accelerates this cycle, intensifying our exposure to the accomplishments of others and magnifying our own perceived shortcomings. As we witness others succeeding, seemingly effortlessly, our own goals begin to feel inadequate or trivial by comparison. The infinite scroll makes our achievements fleeting and insufficient; satisfaction lasts only moments before we return to the bottom of another psychological hill, readying ourselves to push again. This cycle, for me, has become more than metaphor; it’s lived experience. It shapes how I approach work, relationships, and even rest. As someone deeply inside the world I critique, I sometimes feel both exhausted by the loop, caught in the push and pull of comparison, performance, and validation.

I reimagine an ancient Greek vase, one of the earliest forms of graphic storytelling, as a vessel for today’s myths. While researching artifacts that preserved the Sisyphus myth, I came across a black-figure amphora depicting his story, its surface circling with the same endless motion I explore in this project. I became fascinated by the design of Greek vases: the way they narrate myth horizontally across the surface, creating a continuous frieze that wraps around the body of the vessel. When you turn the vase, the story loops endlessly, circling through triumph, collapse, yearning, and recovery. This formal loop struck me as deeply resonant with Sisyphus’s fate—and, by extension, with the loops we inhabit today. The very act of turning the vase mirrors the gestures we make when scrolling through a social media feed. We believe we are discovering something new, seeing more, but in truth we are often trapped in the repetition of the same cycle, unable to break free.

Here is the irony: the vase is built to endure, while the images we scroll through are designed for disposability. This tension raises a question also that haunts much of my practice: Which stories do we deem worthy of permanence? What do we want to carry into the future?

I collected and reinterpreted common images found across social media, redrawing them in the style of an ancient Greek vase. I included the figure of a muscular man taking a mirror selfie, a type of image that often leaves me questioning my own body and appearance;  a friend showing off a designer handbag, images that make me doubt the comfort or luxury of my own life; a cat meme, a symbol of endless, mindless consumption that leaves me wondering why I scroll through so much of it; an image of a couple gazing into each other’s eyes, which often provokes feelings of inadequacy about my own romantic life. Also, I transformed the original boulder from the Sisyphus vase into an online advertisement, stamped with the words “buy now,” underscoring the way consumerism is woven into the very cycles of frustration and desire that social media amplifies.
‍
These are the images I am exposed to daily, the visual currency of our time. They weary me, make me question myself, and urge me toward consumption, looping endlessly through my feed like a modern frieze. By translating them into the language of ancient myth, I wanted to surface the tensions between endurance and disposability, self-doubt and aspiration, humor and despair—revealing how the cycles we inhabit online are as repetitive, and in some ways as punishing, as the ancient loops they echo.

To create the Gen-Zisyphus vase, I chose to build it using the coil method with red clay, closely following the techniques used in ancient Greece. For me, this was not just an exercise in authenticity, but a way of stepping into the past, imagining the position of the artist who once made these vessels. As I rolled and shaped each coil, I wondered about the thoughts and intentions of those ancient makers: what it meant for them to craft a vase that carried myth, labor, and meaning. From physically reconstructing a historical object to embedding it with a contemporary Sisyphus story, one shaped by digital culture, repetition, and exhaustion. Through this process, I wasn’t just replicating an artifact; I was reaching across time, trying to feel the weight of an old myth in my hands, and asking how its meaning transforms when retold today. In remaking the vase, I wasn’t just working with clay. I was reaching for the hands, thoughts, and questions of those before me, asking what it means to carry a myth across centuries.

For the final piece, I crafted a full-scale replica of the Sisyphus vase in red clay, carefully preserving the proportions of the ancient form while completely reimagining its surface. The original mythological scenes have been replaced with images drawn from contemporary social media. The decorative bands that once depicted sacred symbols and patterns are now filled with Instagram UI icons, rows of hearts, and the repeated word LIKE LIKE LIKE circling the neck of the vase.

As the viewer turns the vessel, they encounter a continuous narrative—one that feels at once familiar and unsettling. What was once a sacred object of ritual and storytelling has been transformed into a quiet critique of digital life, a physical archive of images that both entice and exhaust. The vase becomes a mirror of our times, asking us to reflect on what we consume each day, the cycles we seem unable to break, and the small rituals of longing, envy, humor, and desire that shape our online existence.