Labor

Dream Nightmare is from Martine Syms’ Kita’s World series. Kita enacts the performances of everyday life in a hyper-digitized world. The character’s roles range from meditation guru to cultural commentator, and she speaks directly to questions of consciousness within the systems of labor, race, technology, and institutional failure. To the cognitive dissonance of Siri mishearing her speech, to the terror of (mis)representation, to the instinct to reconnect with nature.

Strike Anywhere is a video essay that takes as its point of departure Swedish "Match King" Ivar Kreuger, whose privatization of financial crisis management strategies bears a direct relation to late-20th Century policies implemented by the IMF and WTO. Between 1917 and 1932, Kreuger capitalized on shifts in global financial markets to control over 200 companies and establish matchstick monopolies in at least 34 countries. At the height of his success, Ivar Kreuger was worth approximately 30 million Swedish kronor (the equivalent of 100 billion USD today).

Videofreex member, Ann Woodward, provides a bread-baking lesson.

What do a luxury automobile, a cymbal, and a wall clock all have in common? What are the diverse attachments and experiences produced by those who make these things and those who consume them? What exchanges take place through the object itself—sensually, esthetically, abstractly? We often forget that most of the things we use are made by the labor of others, often in distant places, living dramatically different, diverse lives. What do these objects mean to them? How does their labor, their aspirations, their sense of alienation or satisfaction connect to ours?

Hirsch’s most ambitious film to date and the pinnacle of his trilogy, Nothing New depicts the epic rescue mission of a man whose parachute is caught on electricity power lines. Involving hundreds of participants in a desolate field facing the Jordanian border in the Jordan Valley of Israel, this communal cinematic endeavor aims to re-unite, if only for a brief moment, the collective spirit of the socialist Kibbutz movement in Israel, a movement that has undergone significant ideological modifications.

Short Circuit is an experimental documentary—a semi-autobiographical rant that challenges the obsolescence of human labor at the vortex of the machine and digital ages. Through a flow of images, text, and sound, the mechanical and the electronic clash in the thought processes of our protagonist. Is the global revolt of the machines at hand?

This video examines the iconic World Wide Web branding of the global marketplace, which creates disconnection and contrasts with the labor system in society.

Shot in video-8 at the 1988 Chicago Auto Show, this work examines the artist's personal history with automobiles against the back-drop of an auto plant closing in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The personal stories of real life relationships between people and their cars is dramatically counterposed to the glaring commercialism of the automobile industry and the economic crisis that industry has imposed on the American union workers.

A garage in central Portland, Oregon is the setting for this conceptual re-working of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The garage owner Jay, mechanics and neighborhood denizens serve as narrators, reading lines from the novel that focus on death, love, social inequality and the relationship between individuals and the universe.

In the late 1960s Kim Jong Il guaranteed his succession as the Dear Leader of North Korea by adapting his father's Juche (pronounced choo-CHAY) philosophy to propaganda, film and art. Translated as self-reliance, Juche is a hybrid of Confucian and authoritarian Stalinist Pseudo-socialism. The film is about a South Korean video artist who comes to a North Korean art residency to help bring Juche cinema into the 21st Century.