/~marloes/projects/Capitalist_Magic/

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Capitalist Magic

In her performance "Capitalist Magic" artist Marloes de Valk lets Silicon Valley Evangelists speak through her about AI, technology, death, space, machine consciousness and the future of capitalism. Consisting entirely out of quotes, it is a rite performing a series of magical transformations. Asteroid mining turns into a fun trip to Mars, fear of death into certain immortality, the making redundant of a large part of the work force through ML enabled automation shape shifts into a post-scarcity future of leisure in which humans are the purring kittens on the warm laps of almighty benevolent AIs. Controlling the masses through nudging and mass surveillance is tweaked ever so slightly until it is indistinguishable from the loving embrace of a caring community. The earth and all its inhabitants morph into an eternal flow of information, safely stored on server farms quietly vanishing into the white luminescence of the cloud.

This work shows the performance of the rite of Capitalist Magic by its most talented magicians. Through storytelling it offers an experimental perspective on the ways technologies are narrated and imaginaries around them develop.

Duration: 10 minutes.

This performance was developed at V2_ Lab, as part of an ongoing fellowship. It has been performed at V2_ (2017), Varia (2018) and Art Meets Radical Openness Festival (2018).