#vdrome

While making this film I was obsessed with the idea of how continuous present is forged by economic structures, the way economy mimics nature by trying to find patterns and using the concept of controlled chaos within a certain environment. Economic systems tend to establish themselves as a replica of natural systems in order to survive. Not long ago, when the financial crisis erupted in Portugal, a system was designed to create the illusion of a continuous present, in which the idea of future was erased. Both the Portuguese government and all the news feeds manipulated by market laws, tried—and were successful—to make everyone in the country believe that there would be no future in sight with that amount of debt. The concept of present was stretched in order to become elastic within a specific agenda—to save the European banking system.

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In the film, when I say that economy copies biological structures and tries to organize everything, I’m trying to underline that immaterial forms of abstraction are constantly reshaping the forms of circulation, finding its materiality through representation (images) and objects. Although capital is inherently abstract and manifests itself immaterially, all its consequences are real. I'm interested in the idea of looking, of browsing, as a form of consumption. I’m thinking of Instagram and Tumblr, for instance, and the way they work as a form of projecting our subjectivity while at the same time objectifying ourselves through images, giving shape to desire and immediate need. We’ve always tried to capitalise nature. 

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Modern forms of capitalist consumption are so extremely embedded in human evolutionary processes that I would argue that they effectively manipulate, conscious and unconsciously, our forms of perception. Our relationship with nature is measured within many parameters (also by an aesthetic judgment, as a strategy to give a certain form to thought), but nature has no distinction between good or bad. There’s no moral or ethics in nature. And the modern economic systems are designed to forget about it too.

LISA RAVE - “Europium” on vdrome.org (December, 2016) “... pointing to the material traces of human interventions in geological strata as defining properties of the things and technologies we surround ourselves with.”

PATRICK STAFF - "The Foundation" (2015) @ Vdrome (2016) A portrait of the Los Angeles based Tom of Finland Foundation (a commune partially turned museum/archive)

Andrea Crespo, virocrypsis, 2015, still. Digital video, 16 min 5 sec; Super Weird Rin - Singing Animation by jim830928