Document:Q10241

In making the Cash Flow website, I was given several paintings by Alekos Hofstetter to deconstruct using Flash 6. In each piece, I selected a different way of masking, dividing, or combining Hofstetter's images, then I put the pieces into motion on the basis of mouse movements. Finally I added sound to each. Hofstetter's images all have to do with capital, and are all comicbook style reworkings of already existent photographic material. The paintings estrange the viewer from their content and their human subject matter, which even in their photographic form express the dominion of capital, but with whom we might otherwise feel inclined to feel at home. Hence, for the portraits of Allen Greenspan, I attempted to make the movements, sounds, and tactility cold and slippery. For the Euro Sex pieces, I tried to analyze the expanding and contracting movement of the explosive and contradictory libidinal economy which Hofstetter taps into in the racially charged imagery of those two paintings. For the paintings of the Tokyo and Kuwait stock exchanges I attempted to allude to the ghostly quality of eastern capital for those here in the west, as well as the threat of the corrupt and contradictory nature of western knowledge as regards eastern cultures, or even from one nation to another: knowledge is always brought out and cloaked by the profit motive. Similarly, for the Hong Kong stock exchange paintings, the sounds and movement of my Flash 6 projects should bring out even more the mysteries of a distopian capitalist machine that Hofstetter has coaxed out from his source material, in this case, photographs by Andreas Gursky. For his piece, "Eins Teilt Sich In Zwei," I tried to follow the vertiginous impressions of the spiralling highway depicted in his diptych in terms of sound, movement, the shapes of the samples that are visible in the Flash 6 Project, and its jumpy and unpredictable responsiveness to mouse movement. Lastly, for slump and the painting of the release of the Euro, with the jagged mouse-responsiveness and the exaggerated approaching and receding motion of the paintings, I tried to bring out a sort of confused and contradictory motion of the exchanges of looking and knowing, and in turn, the power relations that structure these exchanges and are structured by them.