Originally Published December 2022
By Hannah Strong
Vibrations - Inner Music:
You are the instrument for your own inner world. If you rely on the boiling of your kettle in the morning to bang the drum of your day, what music will you create when it’s taken away?
If you flick through videos expect a staccato you cannot control, but if one feels only the echo of their reality, a new sonata can roll.
Kassandra Wedel performs her song of the world, which transforms an outer orchestra through the instrument of our body, into a dynamic flow of thought, feeling and expression.
Vibrations - Inner Music recalls the heavy echo that a spine may feel in the heat of danger while transposing it through the movement of life. Subjected to deafness, Wedel can navigate a traffic jam like no other. A stagnancy; her dance, her autonomy, a reclamation of reality, conducted by inner vibrations.
Violet Gave Willingly:
The colourful and friendly ABCs of Anxiety gently guided our inner child into the mnemonic of Violent Gave Willingly.
Black, Brown Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Violet Grey White
Bad Boys Rape Our Young Girls But Violet Gives Willingly
Colours, waves, night-time, pretty, felt, resistors, laughter, and art. All the fibres of Deborah Dumka thread through this documentary. Piercing white veils, Dumka draws red nuances through our teeth as she explores her colourful interactive formations with the interviewer, who shares the resistor mnemonic.
The engineer’s idiom brings together ideas that appear far apart, something Dumka favoured about the subject, had turned into the idea that girls who flee the willing, pure, violet personification, will suffer in their resistance.
Shots of Dumka dyeing felt materials, showing the colour red in different lights, hang a disturbing idea behind the laughter and smiles.
Tik Tok Boom:
A sold out ‘Tik Tok Boom’ glued many adults and their children to one screen for far longer than your average Tik Tok. The film screen, casting a shadow not visible to the eye of the audience, spoon fed yet another opinion. By the end of this film, a united concern may soften one’s blindness, but the infinite trajectories have only been brightened.
The film’s discussion of shadow-banning not only raises the pitfalls of this app but provides a definition for what creates the internet’s insurgent imbalance. Here the trope of Us and Them remains to feed a social contract, as the new market for social influencers tempts too many teens into trading their personal well-being for limitless gratification.
This sadistic algorithm will provide you with all you never knew you needed. Though don’t be fooled by its obedient nature, as before you know it, it’s telling you what to do.
An algorithm will suffice the ego with exactly what it wants and needs to hear; always reinforcing a collective identity. But at what point has your commodification stopped being a choice? When did you decide to subscribe your body as their fuel? As Dostoevsky said, “The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he’s in a prison.”
It cannot be denied that Tik Tok can stage great ideas that deserve to be heard effectively but this comes at the cost of accepting the inevitable backlash that can come with being virtually perceived.
However, moderators’ efforts to meddle with the balance of inequality, causes suppressed issues to spill over and flood much brighter media lights.
Tik Tok unconsciously nudges a particular relationship with the ‘self’ that can serve associated markets and encourage voluntary subjection of younger audiences to exploitative behaviour through media to gain fame and fortune. The twisted DNA of this app not only reinforces social/ personal issues but creates an opening for those wishing to become a particular ideal. Echo chambers of this content may seal the deal on new ideals and continue to profit off these ‘voluntary’ explorations of the self.