The Courier Bag Praxis of Friction

from/about/around a new project by Joana Moll! 

"The Hidden Life of an Amazon User" sheds light on the environmental costs of Amazon’s aggressive monetization of its users: the user is not just exploited by means of free labor, but is also forced to assume the energy costs of such exploitation.

The project includes three commissioned texts by Jussi Parikka, Jara Rochaand Christian Ulrik Andersen & Søren Bro Pold, available on the website of the project. 

 

Link to the project: https://janavirgin.com/AMZ/

 

 

The crisis of presence is always already mundane: a power wasted –or washed away– by a capitalist patriarchocolonial matrix of woven and wefted infrastructures: a braid of powers entwined towards any sort of extraction, growth, and control. The linearity of the uneventful scroll in Moll’s work starts to be crooked, rotated, flipped, interlaced. In its crafted disorientation it asks: Which trans-actions lay beneath, beyond, or behind the monumental source code of a banal purchase (banal both in terms of content and action)? How many instances of capitalist turbo-universalism and techno-colonialism are carried in this scrolling gesture? What are the nuances of totalitarian innovation brought by with the questions that this frictional scroll makes available?

Friction is the result of Moll’s sticky delivery of codified entanglements and complex matterings whose effects and affects are otherwise kept hidden in plain sight. Moll takes as a praxis of friction the tilting of the scroll of a certain hiddenness of presence while braiding the measuring units of a world that contains some lives but not others. In doing so, her work opens up the conversation about what partial reparations might be at hand under elastic guises radically different to those of straight guilt or erected victimhood. And she unheroically winks: ‘be scroll, my friend’.  

Full text here -> https://www.janavirgin.com/AMZ/rocha.html