For an artist who can’t drive, Linn Phyllis Seeger has a deep fascination with cars. Her 2024 film The (Un)event (side c) focused on the virtual traffic of Google Maps, while a new solo show at Shipton gallery features videos of vehicles from the depths of her iCloud archive. Short, disjointed clips show snaking brakelights in a traffic jam, landscapes rolling by, or the sun setting behind the cab of a lorry. Most were captured from the passenger seat in cars of “past lovers and friends”, she tells Dazed, over the course of a decade.

In the show, titled true idle, these clips appear embedded in disconnected car parts – “provisional” sculptures held together with workshop equipment including clamps and bungee straps. Seeger has been thinking about automobiles and their relationship with Silicon Valley tech for several years, and already wanted to experiment with a more sculptural presentation of her ideas when she applied for a three-month residency at Shipton, she explains. By chance, the gallery’s founder came from a family with a background in black cabs. “He was like, ‘Yeah, you can use car parts from our workshops.’ It was a moment of serendipity.”

Over the course of the January to March residency, Seeger developed her ideas further, tracing the ways that transport was used as a metaphor in the early days of the internet. There was the popular term “information superhighway”, for example, while a 1984 Apple ad urged customers to “take Macintosh out for a test drive”. 

“I started to think about that in a literal way, almost turning that metaphor around,” she says, to consider the “navigational gestures” we use to navigate the internet today. When we scroll through social media, for example, there’s a sense that we’re ‘going’ somewhere or making progress. The word “stream” suggests a similar kind of forward movement. But today, where are we really going when we’re online? “It’s not like a few years ago, where the feed was chronological, and you would reach the end,” she adds. “The way the feed is organised now, algorithmically, you don’t really reach the end. There’s not a destination.” In 2026, the information superhighway is really a road to nowhere.

Of course, that’s not what Silicon Valley would like us to think. “Silicon Valley [is] built on a certain imperial imaginary of progress, and how the future is unlocked through an advancement in territory and technology,” Seeger says. We see this expansionist worldview playing out all around us both IRL and URL, as technologists and politicians stake their claim on our futures. “I’m interested in this performance of linear progress online, and how that’s kind of a fiction, because you don’t really get anywhere,” the artist adds. “How do you create a future, or how do you create a path for yourself, or feel agency, in these online territories or terrains that [are] predetermined and predesigned?”

Seeger poses this as a question, but also proposes a possible answer. “As an artist, you cannot necessarily change [the way] technologies are used,” she says. “But I’m interested in finding alternative, poetic forms of using them, of misusing them, and decontextualising them.” That might mean reworking a car door as a sculpture, or taking videos for your Instagram stories then exhibiting them as art (the origin story behind many of the looping images in true idle). Or it might just mean presenting someone with imagery they see online all the time, but in a “twisted” form that “derails” the experience somehow... or drives it off the road.

In true idle, we get to see all these twists and turns, tied up with technologies we use every day. This is especially true for Seeger herself. “Every experience I’ve had in the past 10 to 15 years has been captured on my phone,” she says. “I’ve built this video archive through the impulse of posting.” That said, the “faux found footage” isn’t necessarily autobiographical. It doesn’t bear any traces of people’s faces, or explicit references to a specific place and time, because it’s not about the heroic individual who drives off into the sunset. Seeger seems much more interested in the road itself, and where it may, or may not, take us.

true idle runs at Shipton Gallery from March 18 to April 4.