The video is experienced in an installation of conspicuous size: a mattress is “charged” and tied with cables connected to a screen, suspended above, in a tower some seven meters tall. This reconfiguration of ordinary viewing conditions, where a gentle “cushioned” act of submission is required for the audience to engage with the work, serves as a reminder that what happens to the eyes happens to the body.

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When the work was installed at Art Zone, Roskilde (Denmark), this gesture was emphasised through a performance collaboration with dancer Brynjar Bandelien and artist Sebastian de la Cour.

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The work attends to the urgent question of the mining, brokering and analysis of data, employed for strategic ends by evasive individuals; its “chorus” derives from Mark Zuckerberg’s opening statement to US Congress in April, 2018, in which he states “Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company.”

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The title Tangible Extractions ties data extraction to a long history of resource extraction and imperial oppression, questioning whether the colonised materials that built these omnipresent extraction technologies can be separated from the ideologies that operate them.