Bottled Songs is a multi-platform investigation of desire, power and terrorism in online and social media. The work consists of video letters exchanged between the two artist-researchers - Chloé Galibert-Laîné and Kevin B. Lee.
The first chapters investigate a deceased ISIS social media star and a British journalist who becomes an unlikely spokesperson for the Islamic State. The video letters, recorded from the researchers’ desktops, combine and recombine to form multiple narrative pathways and surprising intersections, revealing larger technological, economic and ideological networks through which desires circulate.
They function within multiple forms: a feature length film, an installation, and audiovisual performance lectures. These multiple manifestations of the work account for the volatile and mutational nature of contemporary terrorism across medias: a network of intersubjective desires perpetually (mis)perceived, (mis)understood, commented, shared, re-purposed and re-contextualized.
The videos alternately depict and interrogate their subjects’ compulsive engagement in the production of everyday myths and fictions about themselves and others. How do personal truths impose their will upon the realm of facts to craft images of reality? How have the utopian promises of the social media age given way to nightmares? How might those promises be retrieved?
Bottled Songs was conceived in 2017 with the support of Harun Farocki Institut and the final feature film will premiere in 2020.
The artists developed the project during their residency with m-cult in August-September 2018, and the installation version of the first two chapters will be presented at the Network Effects exhibition in Helsinki 17.11.-1.12.2019.
The residency and exhibition are realized in context of the European Media Art Platform EMAP supported by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.