On Stability and Youtube Trustfalls
Our world is one of ceaseless reterritorializiation, very obviously in a physical sense, we don’t hesitate to acknowledge the neighborhoods gentrified, the crisis of land and migration across borders, attempts to redefine borders in every sense, down to the voting districts in local elections. But it’s not exclusively physical and might be even more pervasive on those virtual fronts – by way of technology, by way of language, the list goes on. In this work very simple performances barrage the youtube algorithm asking the youtube video editing software to time and again stabilize the image as one falls to the ground. The process reveals every non-human characteristic of the algorithm as each subsequent version of the film is stretched and manipulated toward a more “stable” outcome, whose value as an image or even as a documented gesture are gradually destroyed by language and technology so obviously disinterested in the human experience.