Mindset

As in a modified computer game from bygone times, we glide through an animated labyrinth in a point-of-view perspective. We first go around corners again and again, past walls tiled with circular visual elements from various advertising brochures: lifestyle products, Sudoku, attractive surfaces depicting plants and flowers. They blink as we make our way through. This flow is accompanied by a collage of voice-overs offering motivational and inspirational slogans taken from social media channels: “No need for psychologists when you’re in a forest!” “Why not use the stones people put in your way to build something really great?” “Keep moving – or move over.” We pick up speed. The path goes up, down, back on a straightaway, with roller-coaster and haunted-house movements in dynamic alternation. This would-be stream of consciousness, translated into motion, is directed by those algorithms intended to deform our lives, while they pretend to promote our personal autonomy, whenever we come into contact with the world through the Internet. “High-performance relaxation” is demanded of us “in order to finally find our inner center”, according to the director Veronika Schubert. As it generates patterns and confusion simultaneously, the stream through the labyrinth accelerates while its visual components become smaller and smaller. Color moods change until the artifacts from artificially created personality profiles form mosaic-like images of people plastered across the corridors of this maze, conveying just as little substance as the disembodied voices. In the end, only white walls remain. (Melanie Letschnig)  

Translation: John Wojtowicz