writing

Director's Reflection in Filmmaker Magazine

I wrote a thing for the summer issue of Filmmaker Magazine in which I reflect on the pandemic and the impact its had on my work. An excerpt:

“In 2019 I began making a video work about a computer-generated woman living and working in isolation in a virtual void. From the apartment where she’s been placed, this simulacral subaltern known online as ‘Andra8’ survives through various forms of digital labor–working as a virtual assistant, a data cleanser, a content creator, and a life coach. The domestic space from which she is constantly surveilled and monitored looks like the inoffensive love child of the results of a ‘Mid-century modern’ Pinterest search, a mental health hospital, and a perpetually sunny L.A. Airbnb. In other words: A kind of antiseptic neoliberal purgatory.

At the time I thought the premise of my work-in-progress was fantastical though not entirely unrelatable. Issues surrounding outsourced digital labor, surveillance, and algorithmic cultural flattening have circulated in public discourse for years. But somehow in contemporary life the effects of these on the individual psyche get drowned out by a multitude of distractions. Creating a world where these elements exist in isolation in a sort of vacuum was compelling to me.

I couldn’t have predicted that within a few swift and bewildering weeks in March of 2020 elements of my speculative fiction would quickly come too close to our reality. At present many of us are living in conditions similar to those of Andra8: We reside in state-mandated isolated domestic spaces, the privileged employed work from home, and we are more dependent on privatized technology from which we’re constantly surveilled than ever before. We interact with jpegs and pixels of our friends and family and co-workers…”

Full article here (pages 24-26):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/q3gx8avmj22nhim/FMM_SUMMER_2020_WEB.pdf?dl=0