Lonely Planet 

Lonely Planet is a soft, tactile look at internet culture and the human condition. Examining Kayla Mattes’ tapestry depicting various Internet memes, digital iconography and romantic imagery, I first notice the textile nature of the work; colourful wool and thread arranged meticulously into pictures within pictures overwhelm my senses. It is hard to appraise the work as a whole. This seems to be intentional—the enormity of the Internet cannot be appraised in one sitting, either. The piece feels simultaneously cluttered and empty, its elements isolated from each other on a sea of greys and blues interspersed with streams of bold colour. It is both strange and familiar, cold and warm. As I look at it, I feel an overwhelming sense of exhaustion at the scale of what it represents.

A computer screen is a window into connection with the rest of humanity and yet it is so small and limited.

There are few feelings quite as lonely as sitting in your room in the middle of the night on your laptop and looking up from your computer screen in the dark and realising that though you have this bright little window of information and community, you are completely alone. Your chest aches with something you cannot describe; not quite sadness but close to it, not quite exhaustion but something beside it. You are almost numb, yet welling with a quiet, inexpressible energy that it would be useless to explore. The space between you and the rest of the world is vast and hollow.  You turn back to the screen and resume your trawl through its contents.

Lonely Planet itself is that screen; the borders feature the user interface typical of a MacBook laptop. I myself despise the rare occasions I am required to use Apple laptops. The keyboards lack substance. The keys require light, sleek taps instead of heavy, tactile crunches, the mousepad is rigid and vibrates unpleasantly once clicked. It has always been a poor sensory experience for me. Lonely Planet is much the same in parts. Its pictures are spread apart from eachother and left cold and alone in the sea of grey. 

My own experience with internet culture echoes this sea. The friends I have made and am yet so far from meeting, the stories and memes and songs given to me by faceless strangers as I scroll through the endless feeds of social media platforms. Ideas rush past like leaves in a river, getting caught on a stray branch and sticking there a while where we can see them, before the current tears them away again and they are lost. They distract you, they excite you, but they don’t stay for long.

Lonely Planet’s composition of Internet memes reflects this sentiment; the stark grey of the backdrop may be spotted by these pops of colour, but they cannot cover the underlying monotony completely. Its plush, woven medium evokes comfort and nostalgia, bringing a warm texture and third dimension to its iconography. Yet, the uniformity of the background and the space between them becomes an impassable divide. The images themselves all represent loneliness, isolation, a yearning for connection or some form of hardship as seen through the lens of the internet. Album covers for lonely ballads, existential memes asking questions that seek no answer, step counters showing their user’s lack of physical activity. All of these speak of a deep need for human connection that can only be partially fulfilled by online interaction.

Darker, more topical imagery pervades the piece as well: a snippet of a chat log discussing protests and police brutality, symbols in support of Palestine and opposition of I.C.E, a survey asking the viewer what current threat causes them the most anxiety. Just like that anxiety, these details can be quickly lost in the fog of endless content.

But they still remain ever-present in the background, even as you try to distract yourself.

As an example of an internet trend within the piece, we have the viral sensation Punch the monkey. Punch, a baby Japanese macaque who had been abandoned by his mother and rejected by the troop of macaques he was placed in within Ueno Zoo, found solace in the company of a stuffed plush orangutan. Videos of the baby monkey clinging to his plush surrogate family were posted online, where they quickly amassed enormous amounts of popularity and sympathy the world over. Almost everybody felt a deep sadness and kinship with the little creature and Mattes has immortalised him and his beloved companion in her work to represent this outpouring of emotion. People saw his loneliness and recognised themselves in him; helpless, dependent, isolated. They wanted him to connect with his kind, but even more so, perhaps subconsciously, wanted to connect with other humans as well.

 They knew the pain of rejection and wished it would be removed from the lives of both Punch and themselves. Everyone is alone in their own right, but Mattes takes the knowledge of this universal loneliness and subverts it; the concept of a ‘lonely planet' is an oxymoron, in a sense. Yes, the celestial body itself could be considered lonely, but its population of over eight billion humans and countless other animals,

who all rely on each other in some capacity, could not.

Other symbols featured in the work have more obscure meanings, such as the tarot cards Mattes has incorporated: the ‘Lovers’, the ‘Hermit’ and the ‘Five of Cups’. Tarot, a traditional method of divination, has existed in some form since around the 15th century and yet it is still widely used today, becoming popularised in part by the rise of social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. The first two cards have their own titles with seemingly straightforward meanings, representing the themes of isolation and interpersonal relationships. Still, the lonely, black-shrouded figure in the “Five of Cups” bears no title of their own. According to traditional interpretations of tarot cards, the Five of Cups generally represents grief, loss, disappointment and stagnation. More than that, it is a lack of motivation to move on, a willingness to wallow in hardship despite the possibility of hope.

The cloaked figure stands still, head bowed low toward the five cups scattered lamely around their feet. Three cups are lying on their sides before the figure, their contents pooling on the ground, but two cups persist, standing upright behind the figure, whose sorrow renders them unable to turn and realise what they still have left. I don’t think I know a single other person who often finds it easy to turn around. I can rarely turn around myself.