Today, her work is a bit different. Though perhaps not that much. Bondage and submission are still themes at the forefront of her concerns, though they’re not confined to the power relations of physical bondage in the sex industry—as if they ever really were. Her work has dizzying range, but it all seems to direct us to this observation: in the face of globalized, militarized, corporate power, in the face of heavy surveillance enabled by advances in technology that we could never have imagined ten years ago, and in the face of increasingly sophisticated methods of hacking, of identity and image theft, of internet trolls run by government bots designed to disrupt and disempower, we are both overpowered and no longer able to tell reality from fiction.

If her films are designed to make you feel occasionally out of your depth, then they succeed. They’re a bit like frenetically paced Adam Curtis films, though I’m still not sure whether that’s entirely fair to Adam Curtis. Maybe, like Curtis, there is also a sense of diminishing returns. I mean, all this focus on surveillance, troll bots, memes, art-washing, plus this Matrix-like illusion of reality we’re all labouring under—this probably feels like a pretty familiar drill by now. Doesn’t it? “We have become lost in a fake world and cannot see the reality outside”, as Curtis tells us in Hypernormalisation.

Here’s a paragraph from the title chapter:

“To brutally summarize a lot of scholarly texts: contemporary art is made possible by neoliberal capital plus the internet, biennials, art fairs, parallel pop-up histories, growing income inequality. Let’s add asymmetric warfare—as one of the reasons for the vast redistribution of wealth—real estate speculation, tax evasion, money laundering, and deregulated financial markets to this list.”

There’s something rather tender (i.e mildly ridiculous), about that summarizing of “a lot of scholarly texts”. It’s one of the most straight-forward paragraphs in the book, and, indeed, it is a good summary of what she’s about.

And here’s another, from a chapter called The Terror of Total Dasein:

“The aura of unalienated, unmediated, and precious presence depends on a temporal infrastructure that consists of fractured schedules and dysfunctional, collapsing just-in-time economies in which people frantically try to figure out reverberating asynchronicities and the continuous breakdown of riff-raff timetables.” Are you following? What is a “just-in-time” economy? Or even a “riff-raff timetable”?