Figures of Capital: Music-video as Immanent Critique

Using my own artistic practice as a departure point, the talk will focus on how the performing body of an artist is produced and disseminated through the audio-visual form of the music-video. The talk will animate some of the ways in which contemporary digital capitalism subordinates ‘personality’ to financial appraisal – rendering it ‘operational’ in the words of Emily Rosamond – whilst providing a set of tangible artistic strategies through which such an appraisal might be reconfigured as “immanent critique”. I will show recent artworks where I make use of music-video’s contradictory status as artwork, advert and commodity through disjunctive uses of image, text and sound. The talk will stage a series of interventions into music-video’s modes of production, audio-visuality and structures-of-feeling.