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Maintaining Clarity: Recent Works in Distribution (Online)

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
eai.org
March 15th to March 30th, 2023

Works

AI and I
Cecelia Condit
2021, 7:18 min, color, sound, HD video

Using Amazon’s virtual voice assistant Alexa, a woman (played by Condit) interrogates the nature of consciousness — whether human, animal or man-made — as she walks through the woods, dragging electrical cords behind her like bread crumbs.

Blockedt!
Jayson Scott Musson
2017, 8 minutes, Color, Stereo, English

Assuming the role of visionary CEO Guy White, Musson pitches a functionless “anti-social social networking” app—co-developed with Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti for Rhizome’s Seven on Seven. The app, a blank white screen intended for infinite scrolling without the friction of content, is offered as an “American-sized solution to an American-sized problem.” The interface appeases social media users’ desire to be “connected” by distilling it into one core feature: the sensory feedback of physically caressing a screen. The sole content of the Blockedt! app, a “white void,” sends up digital start-up culture's fixation on flashy, stop-gap solutions and sleek aesthetics—anodyne all-white interfaces that implicitly, perhaps inadvertently, convey whiteness as a default.

Blockedt!
Jayson Scott Musson
2017, 8 minutes, Color, Stereo, English

Assuming the role of visionary CEO Guy White, Musson pitches a functionless “anti-social social networking” app—co-developed with Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti for Rhizome’s Seven on Seven. The app, a blank white screen intended for infinite scrolling without the friction of content, is offered as an “American-sized solution to an American-sized problem.” The interface appeases social media users’ desire to be “connected” by distilling it into one core feature: the sensory feedback of physically caressing a screen. The sole content of the Blockedt! app, a “white void,” sends up digital start-up culture's fixation on flashy, stop-gap solutions and sleek aesthetics—anodyne all-white interfaces that implicitly, perhaps inadvertently, convey whiteness as a default.

Blockedt!
Jayson Scott Musson
2017, 8 minutes, Color, Stereo, English

Assuming the role of visionary CEO Guy White, Musson pitches a functionless “anti-social social networking” app—co-developed with Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti for Rhizome’s Seven on Seven. The app, a blank white screen intended for infinite scrolling without the friction of content, is offered as an “American-sized solution to an American-sized problem.” The interface appeases social media users’ desire to be “connected” by distilling it into one core feature: the sensory feedback of physically caressing a screen. The sole content of the Blockedt! app, a “white void,” sends up digital start-up culture's fixation on flashy, stop-gap solutions and sleek aesthetics—anodyne all-white interfaces that implicitly, perhaps inadvertently, convey whiteness as a default.

Girl Talk
Wu Tsang 
2015, 4:02 min, color, sound, HD video

An iPhone-shot reverie depicting poet and scholar Fred Moten letting loose to the eponymous 1965 jazz standard, performed by Josiah Wise (known professionally as serpentwithfeet). The effect is a blurry, constantly shifting interplay between singer, dancer, camera, and viewer, a cheeky tribute to the fluidity of performed identity.

Score for Joanna Kotze
Shelly Silver 
2019, 04:10 min, Color, Stereo, English

Score for Joanna Kotze was written by Silver for the choreographer Joanna Kotze during their shared time at the Bogliasco Foundation Residency in Italy, and later reformulated as a moving image work. The score itself is un-danceable, examining the attunement to a surrounding environment enacted through performance.

Sobriety
Ulysses Jenkins 
2022, 5:41 min, color, sound, HD video

Jenkins’ music video for his conceptual art band Othervisions offers strategies for keeping one’s head above water amid tumult. Glowing natural scenes—a bubbling stream, spring florals—juxtapose with media clips testifying to widespread global violence and the rise of American neoconservatism....

Three Waves
C. Spencer Yeh 
2017, 4:47 min, color, sound, HD video

Following up earlier works Eclipse and Baby Birds (2009), Three Waves amplifies and investigates the anatomical production of sound and its mediation through sensory technology — what Yeh describes as “kind of a moving-image riff on concrete poetry.”