Music
Taking place in an unspecified year in the early 1990s, a night of mindless television channel flipping is slowly interrupted and overtaken by a pirate television signal. A flood of colours emanating from video feedback, warring tribes displayed through a modified oscilloscope, and a flurry of gun violence repeated via luminance keying dominate stations one by one. Abstract imagery through analog video glitch techniques forewarn the passive television viewer that the far-right American political system to come will not be the result of a sudden shift. Instead we will see a rise of increasingly conservative policies followed by a moulding of public perception by broadcast television.
Music
The Burning Desire in a Dollar Bill shows how the special interests of media conglomerates and their parent companies mould our latent desires at a young age, later leaving us confused as to whether we are lusting after the sexually charged imagery or the products being advertised. The film argues that the act of purchasing is the strongest aphrodisiac in a capitalist society, leaving open the possibility that a solution to toppling capitalism is to shift our sexual desires from consumerism to personal freedom from the state.
The film was created during a residency at Signal Culture using a modified Paik-Abe Raster Manipulation Unit. A running VHS tape was manipulated using a voltage-controlled eurorack modular synthesizer, allowing the object of desire to be distorted, picked apart, and reveal its true form of capitalist allure.
