‘In Safe Mode, Sam Riviere boots us into a brazenly undesirable working environment. It’s an atmosphere, a tint, it’s what might happen when clicking back and forth between tabs in this or that rental dump, shifting mental zones, measuring out days through data and the het-up in-folding of strangers. Sam’s major flair is for channelling our maladapted, disassociated softwares. Broken spam filters, tick removal, the world’s saddest polar bear, undealt-with undertones and a ghostly parade of totemic, masculine constructs rise up out of apparently benign linguistic matter. Like being run through a memory test, repetitions occur in sneaky guises, the faulty bits are re-jostled. In here, words and images are fleeting engagements, but, the text implies, attention is your resource – and, if you stay around and look again, you’ll find even stranger zones firing up in the background.’ – Heather Phillipson.

Out now on Test Centre. Safe Mode will be launched at Burley Fisher Books on Wednesday 12 July at 7pm. Details here.