Trash Girl is endlessly dissected: her actions replayed, her movements paused, her image examined in forensic detail. Yet her interiority remains inaccessible.

Trash Girl (2018) is an interactive video and forum exploring digital voyeurism and anonymous self-righteousness within the internet morality. The story unfolds through a local neighbourhood forum created about a girl carrying a trash bag everywhere. Her idiosyncratic actions become a point of obsession, fuelling a digital folklore formed through anonymous spectatorship, where fleeting communities emerge through schadenfreude, moral superiority and collective humilitainment masked as concerns.

The companion forum, trash-girl.forumotion.com, exists as a standalone portal, hosting the full screen-recorded content and extending the work into an immersive archive. Styled after early Chinese forum (TieBa) cultures, the site transforms the in-video element into a living artifact, with threads made by the main character Jack and other anonymous users.

The format allows viewers to make decisions, choosing which posts to read or perspectives to follow, mimicking how internet communities assemble meaning through fragments. But while the interface offers a sense of agency, the viewer remains trapped in the logic of observation.

Trash Girl is endlessly dissected: her actions replayed, her movements paused, her image examined in forensic detail. Yet her interiority remains inaccessible. There is no conversation, only capture. This asymmetry echoes the emotional architecture of online spectatorship: total visibility without intimacy, permanent memory without context.