[ TOUCH SOME GRASS ]

Master Digital Context · 2025-2026

Mariam Farkhani

Antwerp, Belgium

About

Mariam Farkhani is a graphic designer with a strong passion for internet culture. Her greatest passion still lies in publication and poster design, but for her master's project she decided to temporarily dive deeper into the screen and explore web design and interactive media. The experience proved to be both inspiring and slightly unsettling.

Many of her projects draw inspiration from Moroccan Amazigh culture, which serves as a starting point for developing a contemporary visual language. Themes of identity, culture, community, and communication form a recurring thread throughout her work. She is drawn to typography, images that are just strange enough, and designs that can exist both on paper and on a screen.

She probably spends a little too much time online, but tries to channel that fascination into researching the impact of digital culture on everyday life. When she is not behind a screen, she finds inspiration in art, books, exhibitions, and conversations that exist somewhere between the serious and the absurd... (and TikTok).

Project

My master’s project started with a very simple, slightly toxic question: Are we actually addicted to the content we consume, or are we just desperate for the raw stimulation and friction of a screen?
[ Spoiler alert: it’s 100% the stimulation. ]

To prove this, I built a desktop interface that strips away the actual content and replaces it with pure, unadulterated brain-prikkels. Instead of endlessly scrolling through funny videos, my site forces you to go through a chaotic series of fun, annoying, and totally useless tasks. It completely hacks your muscle memory. If you’re willing to speed-click through an irritating pop-up sequence or solve a weird prompt just to keep your hands and eyes busy, you’re not looking for entertainment, you are just feeding the dopamine monster behind your desk.

This interface is a visual diary of that research. It documents the sheer desperation of digital withdrawal, the times I failed my own detox by scrolling through Kruidvat.Be flyers on my laptop, and how I engineered this glitchy platform to expose our collective screen dependency. I’m supposed to be doing this "for science," but honestly, I’m just exposing my own brainrot. Very meta. Very chaotic. #6_7