FEED ME is Maclean’s longest and most ambitious work to date. Installed in a room resembling a tween bedroom – which adds the cloying smell of cheap carpet to the already intense viewing experience – it depicts a seedy dystopian city where a sinister toy corporation uses invasive online marketing tactics to peddle plastic ‘happiness’ to the masses. Characters range from a voyeuristic, pot-bellied business executive to a schoolgirl social media addict, all played by Maclean. Using Green Screen technology, she has populated the film with legions of cloned versions of herself, laboriously filled in the background with layer upon layer of hyper-saturated computer graphics, and overdubbed the dialogue with the voices of professional actors. Maclean is in fact the sole performer in all of her works – and is just one among a number of recent contemporary moving image artists using performance, personae, avatars and alter egos to hold a mirror up to society and to question identity in today’s post-social media age.

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Maclean addresses the hypocrisies underlying broader contemporary social anxieties over paedophilia, online grooming, personal privacy, and so-called gang culture. She presents an infantilised world in which corporations harvest personal data so that they can more effectively stir up insatiable desires in adults and children alike. They then ‘feed’ those desires with computer games, medications and bottle-feeding dolls . It’s never quite clear who we are to treat as the victims and who the villains, as characters slip from one position to the other. The perspective switches constantly: screens opening within screens, on computers, phones, toys, cameras. Everyone is gazing at everyone else, you get the claustrophobic sense that the film will chase itself round in circles forever.