TANGIBLE EXTRACTIONs
2018
Single screen video (12 min. 30 sec.)/performance – scaffolding tower 2x2x8m, bespoke mattress, cables, headphones. Perfomance collaboration with Brynjar Bandlien og Sebastian De La Cour.
Commissioned by HUMAN NON-HUMAN, Art Zone, Roskilde Festival, 2018 with support from the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Written and directed by:
Anne Haaning
Edit/animation:
Anne Haaning
Voice:
Kasper Holten
Music:
Isambard Khroustaliov
Excerpt of video