MIDI soundtrack, DJEJ, a.k.a. DJ Emma Johnson, “Neoliberal Loops,” Sound, 16min, 4sec., 2025-2026.
https://youtu.be/sFsX02Q-5bM
Video 1 (long durée) - “Stock Market Crashes 1637-2025”
Emma Johnson, “Neoliberal Loops,” Digital Video, 16min, 4sec. on a loop, 2025-2026.
https://youtu.be/AKi7xP3mr8E
Video 2 (medium durée) - “Perusing Zillow and Billionaires’ Row”
Emma Johnson, “Neoliberal Loops,” Digital Video, 32min, 8sec. on a loop, 2025-2026.
https://youtu.be/MKSFirJKqLo
Video 3 (short durée) - “Shopping and Waves by the Statue of Liberty”
Emma Johnson, “Neoliberal Loops,” Digital Video, 64min, 16sec. on a loop, 2025-2026.
https://youtu.be/huizJBq28V8
I was influenced by Seth Price’s 8-4 9-5 10-6 11-7 (2007) and I was influenced by Relational Aesthetics by Nicolas Bourriaud.
Neoliberal Loops is an attempt to materially (video/sound/space) conceptualize neoliberalism employing theories from history, film theory, and visual culture. Neoliberal Loops refers to the loops used in the musical composition, the videos playing on a loop, and the historical loops that we live in. These historical patterns (loops) are described by Braudel’s medium durée. They are exemplified in stock market crashes and events leading up to them on repeat (loops) every 15 years under neoliberal capitalism.
I collected the NYC stock market data from each day of The 2008 Great Recession (December 2007 through June 2009) from The Wall Street Journal and I set up parameters to translate the data into a musical composition. Composed in MIDI, the NASDAQ numbers correspond to musical notes to create a musical composition, with the pitch changing by one half-tone every 50 stock-market points on a musical scale ranging from C3 (middle C) to G5. Notes get lower as the stock market decreases. The music is in 4/4 time with each bar including the opening, high, low, and closing stock-market numbers, represented in four quarter notes. Rests in the music stand in for weekends and holidays when the stock-market trading floor is closed. The first and last notes of the measure can be different because there is a pre- (4am-9:30am) and post-trading market (4-8pm) outside of regular business hours, 9:30am-4pm EST. The musical piece is the duration of a work day on Wall Street.
The musical notes were derived from data charting the rise and fall of the stock market over three different durations: The entire crash, the bailout of AIG, the first and second U.S. bank government bailouts, and the duration of OWS’s occupation of Zuccotti Park in NYC
French historian Fernand Braudel coined the long durée, medium durée, and the short durée, or sea foam, in his work The Mediterranean and The Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949). After WWII, Braudel led the Annales School of history which focused on social structures instead of isolated events. While there, he also formalized structures of economic cycles. In applying Braudel’s concepts to the 2007 Wall Street Crash, I invoke the idea that the crash was not an event but rather a societal structure in place that culminated in disaster rather than an unfortunate, isolated unforeseen anomaly. The three video projections each represent a duration (or durée) of time. Braudel’s three durées include:
Courte durée: short term, e.g., political shifts, bad harvests
Moyenne durée: medium term, e.g., trade cycles over decades to a century
Longue durée: long term, e.g., geographical and social changes that shift over centuries to millennia
I paired each durée conceptually with Nicolas Mirzoeff’s concept of Visuality 1, Visuality 2, and countervisuality, which Mirzoeff writes about in The Right to Look: A counterhistory of visuality (2011). Visuality 1 is visuality that supports the hegemonic state, Visuality 2 can be neutral, or Visuality 2 can include countervisuality which critiques the hegemonic state. The three videos comprising the Neoliberal Loops video installation include:
Long durée/ Visuality 2-countervisuality: Recession goods as economic indicators
Medium durée/ Visuality 2-neutral: video of a domestic space/home with someone looking at Zillow.com
Short durée/ Visuality 1-cultural hegemony: stock market numbers changing in real time
Alternate video: footage of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests among many protests throughout history
All of the imagery in the three videos fade into the sea, bringing it back to the concept of the Mediterranean, or bodies of water carrying connotations of permanence and exerting a strong force on history.
The music incorporates three layers that each draw on stock market data over a short, medium, and long durée.
Video 1: The collection of crashes in a condensed temporal space and placed together in succession illustrates that each crash is not an anomaly but, instead, part of a pattern that spans centuries, from the tulip speculation bubble in 1637 to the U.S. tariffs that caused a recession in 2025. By showing crashes in succession, the viewer experiences the temporality differently. In real life, lived in real time, people forget the last crash faded from public collective memory. However, it’s unforgettable and patterns are recognizable when shown together.
Video 2: Wavelength (1967), directed by Michael Snow, served as an inspiration for the visual aspect of this part of the video installation. Wavelength’s slow zoom into the photograph of waves in a body of water, as well as Braudel’s sea foam of the short durée, led to my choice to use water as imagery. Additionally, water has a cyclical relationship with time creating the motion of waves. I also appreciate the domestic setting of Snow’s film, the interior of an NYC apartment. Snow’s film is 45 minutes, but composed of 18 three-minute segments, because of the restriction that 16mm film could only be shot for 3 minutes maximum. At each three-minute mark in my video zooming in on the water at the feet on the Statue of Liberty, I superimposed an image of a commercial product often purchased during recessions, products that serve as indicators that a recession is coming. These products don’t seem like much individually and appear neutral. But together in succession they tell a story of financial precarity.
Video 3: Zillow.com is both domestic and private away from Jürgen Habbermas’s public sphere. It is also directly linked to the housing bubble because the domestic simultaneously is part of the real estate market. Additionally, many people like to peruse Zillow recreationally. That is, they have no intention of buying anything but use the platform for purposes of fantasy, such as imagining financial security. This phenomenon was even satirized by Saturday Night Live in 2021: https://youtu.be/yEfsaXDX0UQ?si=SILLp-3TTX39fRmY “The pleasure you once got from sex now comes from looking at other peoples’ houses,” one of the sketch’s characters explains. This links the private with the public in the form of houses as domestic space, global financial investment, as well as part of occupying an imaginary space of eroticized rags to riches from house flipping fantasies.
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