In the shadowy depths of Mat Collishaw's installation, mechanical birds tap endlessly at buttons, their ghostly forms locked in an eternal dance of desperation. These spectral creatures mirror our own digital compulsions, pecking away just as we scroll, tap, and swipe through our daily lives.

The birds are recreations of B.F. Skinner's infamous psychological experiments, where pigeons became slaves to random rewards. But Collishaw reveals a chilling truth: the same principles that trapped those laboratory animals now live in our pockets, engineered into every social media platform we use.

Each mechanical tap echoes our own digital rituals, each ghostly movement reflects our learned behaviours. Like the pigeons developing superstitious routines, we too perform our digital dances – scroll, refresh, wait, repeat – hoping for the next hit of validation.

The true horror lies not in the haunting mechanical birds themselves, but in the realisation that we have willingly stepped into our own operant conditioning chambers, carrying them with us wherever we go. In the glow of our screens, we are all test subjects now. In this endless story of scrolls and clicks, isn't it time you became the author rather than the character?

Cover created with the assistance of Canva.com