Body Electric 2024

Directed by Mike Hoolboom

A rework of the new iPhone 15 commercial featuring a singing wall socket. In place of the machine loneliness of the original, a different song from the early Vito Acconci playbook. A direct address to the viewer/listener from a virtual assistant. The new ambient intelligence promises security, rapid response, predictive analysis, microgeneration, efficiency. Here it delivers funwashing messages from the cloud for users in a performative essay on domotics. Talk back from the data harvest and Orwell’s “never sleeping ear.” To challenge them is to “fight the future.”