I first began working with found video via unsecured ip security camera feeds while gathering video material for my senior degree recital. I spent a lot of time watching the cameras, more time than I needed to. The joy of it was people-watching on steroids; following the simple meaningless incident of someone else’s life via a cybernetic eye they had long since learned to ignore. Some of the streams that most interested me were cameras situated in buildings that contained slot machines. Most casinos prohibit filming, yet an institution handling that much cash must retain extensive surveillance. The operational security failures of these establishments led to the leaking of perverse images, and the libidinal value of those images remained untapped just the same.
I am not a gambler, or at least my gambling has been limited to occasional booster card pack purchases or gachapon capsules. Gambling is one of many aspects of the United States of America which I have seen drastically change since I was a child. Sports betting, in particular, has been aggressively deregulated, as has gambling advertising in general. For my generation, various internet gambling avenues have become increasingly popular, in conjunction with the rise of cryptocurrency, while remaining functionally impossible to regulate. The crypto-slots enthusiast streams their deterioration for profit on a platform funded by the money they throw into a black hole. Totally obscured(crypto(currency)), totally surveilled(the Platform and its Cybernetic Eyes). The spectre of deregulation is indivisible from the pull and the reels.
Aesthetically, our viewership plays at networks within networks. The blurred line between model and reality. Where the libidinal can and cannot tell the difference.
This performance is but one aspect of a larger project of mine, driven by the goal of unveiling the cybernetics that sit within our lives but which we ignore; to chip away at the minimal-humanist blob-design corporate-memphis facade atop the cyborg bodies we all inhabit, revealing the networks we are enshrined in.
We sit in a cathedral of invisible wires. Our behavior is fuel for a gigantic pseudorandom cum random cum postdetermenistic desire machine where we are both input and output. The perfect cyborganism. We watch the slots.