Full Faith and Credit
2018
Two-channel HD video installation with sound
Infinite loop
Installation dimensions vary
Installation documentation from ‘Paper Empire’, Bus Projects, Melbourne, 6 – 30 June 2018
‘Full Faith and Credit’ is a 2-channel video installation that appropriates found texts to create in voice-over, an economic debate between two characters. On-screen these voices are represented by either a globe of fire or of blood. As each voice delivers its partisan call or response to Ayn Rand-ian economic rationalism, the alternating screen shows a study in macro of the US dollar bill. As the work progresses, and the bill is crumpled into a geographic terrain, the arguments presented by each side shift, seeming to swap opinions altogether before devolving into a-political nonsense and looping back around on themselves. The work’s use of found text explores how the language of political ideology can function and in its adaptation, what slippages of meaning are possible. Further, the artist’s outsourcing of the voice-over recording to the online ‘gig-economy’, and the shifts in emphasis and inflection that came with it, probes at the pliability of polemic dialog. In pairing these slippages with the broadly symbolic forms of fire, blood, and money, the work creates new understandings of how this kind of play with text and image can prompt new considerations of socio-economic ideologies.