A website that asks us not to click has already given us a reason to do so. The prohibition awakens curiosity about what it might conceal. Debora Hirsch makes this contradiction the premise of donotclickthru, whose website has the stated ambition of receiving zero clicks. The title is both an instruction and an address. Before we have encountered the work, we have already begun to negotiate its terms.

The site presents a succession of images, drawings, and texts that adopt the familiar conventions of online communication. Each encounter offers something to discover while preserving the suggestion that something more awaits. Pleasure lies partly in that anticipation. Disappointment can renew the search, making an unsatisfying encounter the occasion for another click. Hirsch turns this ordinary rhythm into a question about agency: at what point does the freedom to continue become a difficulty in stopping?

The forms through which information appears exert their own persuasive force. A list lends even arbitrary material an appearance of order. Repetition can make a position seem widely shared, allowing visibility to be mistaken for consensus. Within these familiar arrangements, a possibility acquires urgency, an uncertainty hardens into conviction, and a partial account begins to stand for a whole. Hirsch attends to the small transitions through which information becomes an inducement to think, feel, or act in a particular way.

Gathering images and texts from different media, she reworks this material through drawing, painting, and video. One drawing asks, “If everything is out there, what is left within you?” The question brings the inquiry into the space of private experience, where what we encounter is absorbed, considered, and made our own. It asks what becomes of that space when attention is continually directed outward, toward material that solicits a response.

The paintings extend the inquiry across Brazil’s colonial history, the circulation of images before digital communication, the contemporary world, and its possible futures. This temporal range gives the mechanisms of persuasion a longer history. Images already carried authority, transmitted beliefs, and shaped relationships of power before their circulation acquired the speed and reach of digital networks. Hirsch’s historical references invite consideration of what changes with the means of transmission and what persists within them.

The digital world also takes on the character of a relentless mirror. The image in which we recognize ourselves can become an image available to others, giving the familiar encounter with a reflection a public dimension. Recognition brings pleasure, but visibility also brings exposure. The promise of open, reciprocal communication exists alongside the prospect of increasingly predictable behavior and diminishing privacy. The wish to participate and the need to preserve an interior life place competing demands upon the same person.

 

“We may think about the digital world as a sophisticated reflection device, a relentless mirror. Mirrors are destabilising but we are fascinated by them as our reality attracts and terrifies us. The Narcissus myth, recreated by Borges, reminds us that one cannot stand that tension for long. We have never had so many reflective surfaces and information.”

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Her work seems familiar but whether its meaning refers to digital culture, popular beliefs, religion, oppression, nature, burden, or something else altogether, one cannot say. These artworks engage us in and engender conversation. They do not censor or support their subjects leaving any such judgments to the onlookers.