Hi How Are You Guest 10497, 2011

'Hi How Are You Guest 10497'; in this video work, a woman, living alone in Manhattan, tries to find a way out of her solitude through connections in the strange new world of the online network. Through this simple departure point complex issues emerge: What is it to be alone? What is it being one’s self? What is it to be a woman today? What is it to be real, to be naked, with another — who is only on screen?

Raimonda Skeryte explores these questions by becoming a mirror for seeing our own sexuality, our boredom, and global interconnected loneliness. From encounters with Yakuza gangsters to international sex workers and through Skeryte’s own sexual awakening the work gives visibility to how images of our selves are created in our digital society. It is simultaneously an exploration of what it means to make — and watch — film today; what it means to inhabit a system that is always recording, where identity is always and already enmeshed in the web of becoming.

'Hi How Are You' is simultaneously an exploration of what it means to make — and watch — film today. To make a document of oneself inside the network that is always recording.


REVIEWS / ESSAYS
'If net living were a movie, this would be it. Lafia knows what you do and what you want to do, as well as how you feel about it. Crazy good. And restrained, even!'
Douglas Rushkoff, author, media theorist, Program or Be Programmed

'The concept is completely relevant, our global interconnected loneliness.'
Jean Christian Bourcart, artist

'Poignant and beautiful. A profound loneliness permeates the film. Raimonda Skeryte has a radiant presence, dare I say as deep and captivating as Renée Jeanne Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc.'
Lizzie Gottlieb film director, Today's Man

'A new way to think film and cinema as a kind of networked publics. Great and innovative project that lets us see the very wired forms of social relationships that are hard to describe. A great movie. That females will often get social feedback and get hooked in these new services, as this women in your movie is precise and accurate. The movie describes this feeling of loneliness, and hope of social acceptance extraordinarily well.'
Petter.B.Brandtzag, social media theorist

'Powerful and intimate. This is a network life. In her solitude, she remains connected — however ethereally, however precariously — to the world around her. Only the world around her is more often than not a telepresence. As users of Chatroulette discover, once the meta-narrative of identity disappears — once we stop naming ourselves, stop declaring our social status, our taste, our social tethers such as work and education — we discover something else. Within the presumed mediation of the screen, we discover the immediacy of the encounter.'
Daniel Coffeen, social philosopher


A Network Life: On Marc Lafia's "Hi How Are You Guest 10497" Daniel Coffeen

At first, it seems she's alone. Indeed, we rarely see anyone else — at least in the flesh. She lives alone in a small Manhattan studio. There is basically no dialogue as she doesn't seem to interact with anyone at all.

And yet she is always interacting. We may not see her interlocutors, they may not be present as flesh, but that doesn't make them any less real.

This is a network life. In her solitude, she remains connected — however ethereally, however precariously — to the world around her. Only the world around her is more often than not a telepresence.

What we witness is a different way of going in the world, a different kind of identity, a different kind of social contract. As the title of the film suggests, traditional identification has gone away. She is without name and interacts with anonymous guests known only by their number or avatar.

There is no doubt a great loneliness here. But to reduce her to lonely is to miss so much of what's happening. Because as users of Chatroulette discover, once the meta-narrative of identity disappears — once we stop naming ourselves, stop declaring our social status, our taste, our social tethers such as work and education — we discover something else. Face to face — or screen to screen — with a stranger, free of all meta-discourse that would prefigure the interaction, we discover incredible intimacy. All there is this encounter, these desires, this moment. Within the presumed mediation of the screen, we discover the immediacy of the encounter.

This is not to say that the network life is a life of singular immediacy. It is, after all, a network; it is multiple. And so we see her try to navigate this multiplicity, this teem of possibility, these different ways of going.

And, in particular, the ways of women-going or woman-becoming. As she makes her way through these chatrooms — some are more explicitly sexual — we see her encounter the breadth of possibilities of how to go as a woman, as a sexual woman, in the network. Just as the internet brings us the near-infinite breadth of consumer goods, it brings us the near-infinite breadth of identities. Look at all these modes of becoming woman! Look at all these modes of the erotic!

When we see her dress and leave the house, it is in a man's tuxedo. With her short hair and almost boyish body — although feminine through and through — we are witness to a certain twilight of fixed gender, a place of becoming where labels will not stick hard or fast.

The gaze that would fix her as woman-object has been multiplied. If John Berger finds woman nude in the fixed point of the Renaissance gaze, Lafia finds her naked, criss-crossed with thousands of gazes. Indeed, the film performs this: we see her seeing herself be seen, the film's camera often behind her computer which itself both camera and screen. The gaze has been proliferated and, with it, identity.

One thing that makes this film so powerful, so intimate, is that we get the sense that there is no crew, no cameraman, no boom, a woman filming herself. And in this seemingly simple act, she has already multiplied herself, made herself something that is seen. But not as an object. This is not a voyeuristic film. We are not invading her privacy. She is not nude; she is naked.

Because this is a network life, a place where identity is always and already expressive, always and already enmeshed in the world, in the web of becoming-selves, in the endless criss-cross of gazes and exchanges.

The camera, then, does not excavate. It does not mediate. It proliferates and connects.



A post, Social Screen Test, about the thought and influences of the work on my blog.