“Scroll or Die” is a chance to ponder our relationship to the mobile phone. It’s partly a game, a fragmented essay, a visual cacophony. Making and experiencing mobile art is a challenge from both ends. Can a phone generate artistic experiences or will it only flatten into distraction? The device is not neutral. It is designed for efficiency, monetization, and surveillance. Do we embrace the medium or resist it? We ask you to hold your phone as you always do, but also to see it differently.
The work has the shape of a game, but we can not guarantee that it will be fun. Fun is a product category, and this is not a product. We hope you immerse in it, and that you are alienated by it. We love how the touch screen activates your body, not just sight and sound, but the spastic movements of thumbs and index fingers. You can play it to win or play it to understand what we are trying to communicate. You can play it to lose, enjoy, waste time, be embarrassed and eventually succeed.
The drawings were made by hand in a notebook on different trains through Europe and the code was stitched together in the curious space between structure and experimentation. Can we liberate the phone from app companies and state surveillance? If we can, it is only by making small weird experiments to challenge the sensibilities of the user and the strictly circumcised functionality of the device we have chosen to go to bed with.
// Nea Landin & Gabriel Widing, Stockholm, August 2025
SCROLL OR DIE was created by Nea Landin & Gabriel Widing
Thanks to Tom Milnes & Scott Cazan, and everyone who play tested
FRAMEWORKS USED Tone.js