The Warden, still from Steven Cottingham’s Chain-link, 2022.
THE MOST PRESSING QUESTION ON EVERYBODY’S MIND IS: WHAT IS CHAIN-LINK, EXACTLY? ALSO: HOW IS THIS THING EVEN POSSIBLE?
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Here are seven possible answers (warning: spoilers ahead).
First, Steven Cottingham’s monumental machinima is a penetrating commentary on carceral capitalism, after the title of a seminal collection of essays by Jackie Wang for Semiotext(e)'s Intervention series about the ideology and practice of incarceration in America, including - but not limited to - predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, cybernetic governance, and algorithmic policing. On a narrative level, these themes are introduced through the converging stories of Genysys 3 Copy 2 aka "Copy" - a cloned human with the ability to hack & hijack corporate drones - and Matisse, a black hacker who (allegedly) forges cryptoart tokens.
The two meet in prison and, after some initial distrust, become (more than) friends and partners-in-crime. They share more than their cell. We also meet the mysterious The Warden - a White woman in suit-and-heels whose priorities seem to go beyond the simple management of the prison - and her subordinate, The Counselor, a black officer who somehow naively believes in the “correctional” purpose of the facility she supervises. Most of the action takes place within the walls of New Jericho’s maximum security prison. However, we soon understand that, in Cottingham's world, there is no real difference between the inside and the outside: Matisse argues that everyone is being surveilled. At all time. Thus, being imprisoned and being free is just a matter of semantics: the "algos" make sure that everything runs “smooth” and don't cause any trouble. In other words, control is omnipresent, predictive, and repressive: the police actively suppress any social gatherings by showing up en masse in what remains public spaces even before people start to gather. And when the protesters do eventually show up as predicted by the machinic pre-cogs, their game is over.
Matteo Bittanti
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