Comic Strip explores the concept of Automation Anxiety — the stress and unease that can arise as technological development accelerates and increasingly shapes human life. While Artificial Intelligence currently dominates public conversation, bringing concerns around job loss, deskilling, and the erosion of trust in knowledge and information, the work makes clear that this anxiety is not unique to AI, nor to the present moment.

Research shows that Automation Anxiety has accompanied technological change for centuries. This sculpture reflects that long history, presenting anxiety as a recurring human response to innovation rather than a purely contemporary condition.

The work is structured as a timeline, conceived visually as a railway line running from left to right. This linear arrangement provides a framework onto which successive phases of technological development are mapped. The black blocks, or “sleepers,” mark key stages in this progression, acting as anchors for moments of technological shift.

The first sleeper incorporates a found object: an original shuttle from a textile loom. The mechanised loom represents one of the earliest flashpoints of Automation Anxiety, when skilled labour was displaced by industrial-scale production and mechanised mills reshaped working life.

Subsequent sleepers reference a succession of historically anxiety-inducing technologies, including the steam engine — reinforcing the railway analogy — followed by manufacturing mechanisation, computing, and other transformative innovations.

The final stage of the timeline is represented by a computer circuit board and a hard drive, mounted within a small wheeled carriage. This element symbolises AI, supercomputing, and emerging digital technologies, positioned as the most recent arrival on the line — a continuation rather than an endpoint.

Comic Strip invites the viewer to reconsider contemporary technological fear as part of a longer, repeating cycle, in which innovation consistently generates both opportunity and unease, adaptation and anxiety.