Apex Gaze

2018
9min Single-Channel HD Video

Installed in Para-Para Dance Machine Pod made of Unistrut and rubber mat

Ruskin Degree Shows 2018
Bullingdon Road Studios, University of Oxford

“So Apex Gaze is a project that aggregated a lot of my research about a contemporary, transnational, hyper-networked form of sociality. The main points of departure are the Para Para Dance fad (the metal frame installation is sort of an utilitarian-skeletal version of the machine you would find in arcades), the ‘terrifying’ notion of dancing alone, and its tropeic connotations. Weaving together CCTV footage of warehouse parties, GIFs, YouTube interviews and other found footage, I sought to narrate a crowdsourced sense of social displacement/anxiety (think FOMO) engendered by increasing (self-)surveilling mechanisms.

It is a diffracted narrative, just as the prescient McLuhan promised. And to interrogate the techno- epistemological claim for hyperconnectivity, we need to ask ourselves: in a laissez-faire market for relationships, how many individual connections made will actually go through not just the form, but the substance of desire? Missed connection is perhaps a tautology.”