DANGEROUS && MOVING

POSTHUMAN DESIRE IN A FLEETING WILDERNESS OF CONTENT

“Posted. Posted. Posted. slowly the content began to weep and long for- a narrative as a continuous reaction to information and its discontinuity- as a condition of -human- temporal -contingent with- the ancient Sanskrit word for wild animal, ‘mrga’ was used especially for the deer because hunting became so focused upon- the word ‘deer’ comes from the proto-Germanic ‘deuzam’ (meaning wild animal) - a form of differentiation from early man - “used his voice, largely as does one of the gibbon apes at the present day, in producing true musical cadences, that is in singing...this power would have been especially exerted during the courtship of the sexes, serving to express various emotions, as love, jealousy, triumph, and serving as a challenge to their rivals. The imitation by articulate sounds of musical cries might have given rise to words expressive of various complex emotions. ”

Online video series created by archiving and editing amateur videos of deer posted online by users- from hunting videos to unexpected backyard encounters.

By engaging with the deer subjectivity in a human body through trancelike states of meditation on the forces that drive all life forms she constructs vocal incantations of deer in the grips of a destructive and unstoppable desire.

The videos unfold as fragmentary and obscured visions of a narrative of love, desire, reproduction and death.

By positing the videos online, the work engages with the genre of online fanfiction inspired by the performance of a juvenile hyper-feminine in the nihilistic queer love story of Russian Europop band t.A.T.u. //// the processes by which virtuality elicits a constantly frustrated hope for life not found in the material world.

Stitching grand narratives onto disparate individual wild animals captured in amateur user-submitted videos posted on youtube exposes human tendencies towards narrative subjectivity in the face of 1) the “physical-natural” biological world and 2) the “virtual-algorithmic” online world.

Dangerous && Moving pits the subjectivities imposed on virtual content viewed online alongside the narratives we impose on the natural world via humans’ tendencies to anthropomorphize animal behaviors and impose narrative upon biological trends.

Cycles of death and reproduction inherent in the video documents- the changing of seasons and the stages of deer life (birth, sexual maturation, reproduction, and death)- guide me in vocalizing trancelike utterances of a doe deer subject struggling to hold onto life amidst a doomed pursuit for the object of her desires, also a doe deer.

Dangerous && Moving, an evocative and tragic queer love story, pushes the limits of our existing narratives of love, ego, death, reproduction and futurity in the face of pre-human and post-human temporalities.

Videos are reposted on youtube for Internet users worldwide to encounter amidst the archive of deer videos from which the series arose.

It is crucial that these videos, once re-inserted into the algorithms of the youtube platform, remain undifferentiated from the mass of user-posted videos of deer and rather than emerging from the archive as “net art”.

To complement the series’ secret virtual existence, I create opportunities for immersive multimedia installations of the work for audiences in the physical world.