Anyone who has not yet experienced digital information overload should try standing in front of the artwork Present Shock II.
Installed outside the Melbourne Town Hall for the second year of the city's arts-technology festival, Now or Never, it is a board of statistics like you have never seen before - an ever-changing digital sculpture with no end or beginning.
From the number of stars being born in the observable universe, to how many Instagram uploads are taking place right at that moment, it is mind-blowing real-time information ... and lots of it.
But how much of it can be relied upon? The numbers - along with a news feed - are presented as fact but are impossible to verify.
"It's a reflection of this post-truth world that we're trying to navigate right now," artist Matt Clark told AAP.
"It's full of humour, confusion, and some quite serious news topics.
"It's essentially looking at how we're exposed to all of this stuff on a daily basis and our brains are perhaps not wired for this kind of consumption of information."
Clark is the co-founder of the London collective United Visual Artists, which started in 2003 and specialises in tech artworks.
Present Shock II references the futurist Alvin Toffler's 1970 book Future Shock, with its forecast of a world up-ended by rapid technological change.
With a discomfiting soundtrack designed by Massive Attack's Robert Del Naja, the artwork is also a homage to United Visual Artists' very first project, an installation for Massive Attack's 100th Window tour, which as it happens, kicked off in Melbourne in 2003.
At the climax of the concert, massive LED screens showed a deluge of statistics to the euphoric audience.
"It was supposed to reflect the dizzying and confusing way that we try to understand the world through information [but that was] 20 years ago, before social media and the challenges that we face with AI," Clark said.
All this is, of course, worryingly prescient and points to a future in which information is so pervasive and unreliable, it ceases to have any meaning at all.
But for those who step inside the Town Hall, there is a kind of antidote to the darkness of the digital age: a second installation titled Silent Symphony.
It consists of seven mechanised arms with lights and speakers, that stand five metres high and are programmed to move gracefully, creating a dance of sound and light.
While it looks very different to Present Shock, this installation is based on numbers too; inspired by the Ancient Greek notion that celestial bodies moved in harmony to create music, its movement design deploys data from NASA tracking of movements in the solar system.
"It's a place where people can sit down and be immersed by light and sound and kind of contemplate the forces that govern our existence in the universe, such as gravity, space, time," Clark said.
The soundtrack is by Melbourne-born musician and sound designer Ben Frost, who has worked with the likes of Brian Eno and is now based in Iceland.
Now or Never is still relatively new on Melbourne's festival scene, but Clark is a veteran of similar tech-focused arts events in Europe and the US.
These are a way to reflect on the seismic shifts that technology has wrought on society - and what might be still to come, said Clark.
"We're probably going through the most significant changes in technology, for good or bad, with artificial intelligence and the impending effects of that."
Now or Never runs from Thursday until August 31.
