In My Network

In My Network is grounded in the worlds of influencers and vloggers. Their introduction to Facebook, the obligations. The gestures of haul videos, the palm behind the product, the palm is the product. Four hundred Euros here, a complaint about another there.

A separation between voiceover and content. Questions raised about how Chanel would have reacted to her demattifying powder on black skin. Illusion abounds, relationships as complicated as being a self described "tumblr girl" on Insta(gram). Not just links to links but relationships as rather than around the content. "but they avec their own boyfriend of girlfriend" [sic]

"it's nobody's business". It is business. It's not just that they work here, it's that the work is around the camera, around perception. A confrontation with the narrator becomes even more powerful when it's paired with the seeming falsehood of self-acceptance.

Randa Maroufi's film is easy to read as an echo of complaints about youths and their tablets that goes back to the Sumerians. It's not though, significantly more significant in an examination of the demands to present a particular façade, the erosion of other channels and paths to success. In constructing artificial versions of these spaces where artificial versions of selves are constructed to sell selves to others there's a more nuanced exploration of the associated phenomena. The bell might ring for the end of the day but the phones get picked up and the notifications keep going. Contrast that with the dignity, if any, of a different labour, pushing a machine across the floor to re-polish old concrete.

What are the alternatives? "only the telly in black and white" ? To make a more formal studio of these informal arrangements is find the alike and subliminal of the like and subscribe. This is a process where lights are literally shone upon subjects. Guillame Brault's camera is one of many, every phone a studio, every collaboration a promotional opportunity. The recursively unreal spaces are an environment produced by external constraints. Where there are no other opportunities the notionally endless possibilities of this hollow ground hover before us as illusory and haunting as any dagger before the Lady Macbeth. Even the echoes in this chamber tell us something, there is no curtain never mind no man behind it. The gravedigger and the porter both are replaced by another upon this stage, the cleaner pushes his machine as far as he can. Yet even he is under the spell of these circumstances, the snap of selfie as final as any headsman's axe.