Dead. Air. Management. (2018)

HD video with sound. 14″ 36″. Originally produced for the exhibition “We Are Having a Little Flirt” at the Pump House Gallery, London.

Consisting of video material split across two timelines and a single audio track, the work addresses issues of standardisation, repetition and appropriation in the music-video. Existing somewhere between video-essay and performance, Dead. Air. Management. incorporates three lip-synched performances to a single offscreen narrator, alongside an analysis of found footage from music-videos (featuring Taylor Swift, Lana Del Ray and Shakira). Constrained to repeating the same single ‘confessional’ monologue, the performers appear simultaneously life-like yet inanimate, ruminating on the nature of choice in various social contexts. The performers’ lack of agency is contrasted with the fantasy space of the music-video, a site in which ‘autonomy’ is synonymous with the commodity form and ‘personality’ is reducible to a brand. By exposing these dynamics, Dead. Air. Management seeks to interrogate how desire is produced and reproduced within an audience and capitalised upon across a media circuit.

Credits: Colette Tchantcho, Olivia Furber, Kaja Pecnik (performers) Daniel Dressel (camera)