Contribution to the catalogue for the Channels Festival International Biennale of Video Art 2019.

doubleplusungood

You are being watched as you read this. Monitored by a stranger in another country. They know where you live, what you bought at the shop, every swipe of every card, every tap of your phone, every website click, every ‘like’, every post you ever deleted. All of it recorded and stored in a private database you will never be able to access, a digital reflection of you in all your naked truth. Locked and loaded.

You can backtrack, untag, unfollow, unfriend, delete your entire digital history but it will only be erased from yourself. Like trying to forget a memory planted long ago in a now overgrown pathway of neurones, your digital ‘self’ will go on, outside of your reach, hidden away among all the fragments and junk and wonder until it’s revealed to the world once more.

‘The meaning of an act lies not in its doing but in its being seen’, states journalist Rahila Gupta in the 2015 video work The Unreliable Narrator by artists Noor Afshan Mirza and Brad Butler. Here truth is reflected and dissolved into terrorism as entertainment, layers of deceits choreographed, filmed and screened worldwide. The image has the power to both inform and corrupt.

The Unreliable Narrator highlights the ease of manipulation through images and draws awareness to the media methods of both the formal and invisible powers that be – to keep you in line, consuming, unquestioning. The eponymous unreliable narrator sums up the feelings evoked in the disturbing film when she says we are ‘complicit in our fascination with the power of the image’. You do not feel complicit and yet you are.

You did not vote for the government in power and yet they rule you. You do not advocate the military-industrial complex and yet you support it every time you use the internet. You do not agree with the status quo but, just like everyone else, you use the same software, hardware, currency. Limited by design, any resistance now requires open rebellion, with all the real world risks that entails to reputation, career, income, friendships.

Truth is reality. Truth is relative. Truth is an illusion. There is no truth. Pick a philosophy and pin your deepest hopes on it. You may as well try to climb to the moon. Search online. Choose your own answer. Ignore what you do not understand and anything that contradicts you. Facts are optional. Opinions are king. Search online. Do not pass page one. Click on your desire. Copy and paste. The truth is an upside-down smiley emoji.

Fake is the new real. Fake news, headlines, photographs. Fake politics, promises, votes. Fake celebrity, eyes, lips, teeth. Fake companies, ads, profiles, tweets. In a world of spectacle, everyone runs through an endless maze of illusion without end. A maze of staged events, mind control, media manipulation, all punctuated by retail therapy or moments of freedom when you leave the house carrying only your keys.

You are being watched. Your phone is a spy. It listens when you talk with your friends. It watches as you binge stream. It knows your private desires, your deepest secrets. It betrays you every day to an invisible enemy. A little slave in your pocket, accumulating a sum total fake version of your real life, all to sell back to you. This is the truth, the real doubleplusungood.

WRITING & CONCEPTS X CHANNELS FESTIVAL 2019

Writer and Speaker at the Channels Festival: International Biennial of Video Art 2019 in association with the WRITING & CONCEPTS 2019 Lecture Series.

Channels Artistic Director Kelli Alred
Channels Editor & Engagement Curator Laura Couttie
Writing & Concepts Moderators Jan van Schaik & Fjorn Butler

The 2019 Channels Festival seeks to expand notions of difference, connectivity, power and place. Participating artists from Australia and around the globe have been invited to develop and present works that deconstruct notions of belonging, complicity and resistance. Rolling out across Melbourne over three weeks (with the addition of a few post-festival events), the program presents six exhibitions, including two new commissions by Archie Barry and David Rosetzky, four video art screening programs, several performance works and a significant schedule of public artist talks, lectures, conversations and discussions. The 2019 festival situates Australian video art in the context of parallel practices from Europe, Asia, the Middle East, the USA and our neighbours in the Southern Hemisphere. 

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WRITING & CONCEPTS is a lecture and publication series exploring the insights that visual arts practitioners have in to their own creative and cultural practices, and provides an opportunity for them to discuss and publish these insights in a public forum. Contributors include practitioners for whom the written form is their primary professional output and practitioners whose work manifests as exhibitions or events within the domain of contemporary art.

WRITING & CONCEPTS is produced by Future Tense and moderated by Jan van Schaik and Fjorn Butler, and is supported by each of the host venues, MvS Architects, RMIT’s School of Art and School of Architecture & Urban Design, Melbourne University and ART + AUSTRALIA .

Din’s talk ‘Post-Truth and Art (or how not to Instagram your way to fame)’ was held at 6:00 pm Thursday 12 September @ ACMI X, Level 4, 2 Kavanagh St, Southbank VIC 3006 (corner of Sturt St and Kavanagh St).

Download a copy of the festival program here.