From movies to television, YouTube to TikTok, it’s a big world of audiovisual media out there. How many videographic works have tried to take them all in? A new installation work has tried to do just that. The Extended Play is a collaboration between artists Anina Müller and Jennifer Merlyn Scherler, which was exhibited at the Austellungsraum Klingental in Basel. The piece consists of four videos, or tracks, that function like a musical EP. Collectively they explore how moving images influence the ways humans inhabit their bodies, an extended play if you will.
Track 1: The Portal borrows from stereotyped cinematic, dreamy imagery to explore the moment of exiting the cinema in a daze, where on- and off-screen worlds bleed into each other.
In Track 2: The Main Character, two characters enter a medieval fantasy world cosplay inspired by Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, music videos and TikTok.
Track 3: crying selfies <3 reflects on the selfies people, especially young femmes, take when they cry – as a refusal to participate in the capitalist, neo-liberal “girlboss” mindset.
Track 4: No Pose No Rose is a YouTube style talk show on bodybuilding, exploring its exaggerated presentations of gender and an image-based understanding of the self.
As part of the exhibition, the artists invited Kevin B. Lee and Johannes Binotto, co-leaders of the SNSF project “The Video Essay: Memories, Ecologies, Bodies” to share their reflections on the themes of their work in a joint conversation. They talk about their own relationship to different modes of media experience, from movies to social media, and the effects of these experiences on their own sense of embodiment.
The Extended Play was supported by the Fachausschuss Film und Medienkunst BS/BL.
