splitscreen single channel video, 2017, 25min, HD
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…always looking, always consuming, always working, always walking, working and wondering about the forces, about the lead in and the way out, always looking, always working, always working and walking and wondering about the system…

The afterlife of working gloves is a video work using footage (stills and video) found on eteam’s daily walks in New York city over the course of two years. The work begins with split-screen pairs of a still image; a discarded working glove, juxtaposed with a short video clip, generally of a scene from nature as shot by eteam using only an iPhone

The walking guide over the bridge. The bridge between one side and the other. The bridge over troubling water. The bridge over bubbling water. The answer to the why. The filling of the form. The forming of the shape. The walking of the shadow. The shaping of the mind. The mind kept busy. Same time, same place, different temperature. Same time, same place, different variation. Every day at 4:22pm we set in motion the rule that leads to reliable outcomes…

Each image/video pair lasts a few moments, with a voiceover narrating passages like the one’s above. The work moves, both visually and narratively via associations that are non-linear, disjunctive, and surprising, but also, and especially in retrospect, somehow logical and necessary. The narrative reads as if written by a discarded alpha version of an AI making its way slowly in the direction of sentience.

Programmed to repetitively follow associations that it cannot —and can never—make sense of, it is left to obsessively—but distractedly—retry each variation in an absurd and almost Sisiphysean quest for understanding that is strangely compelling to experience

We might imagine subsequent versions of our imaginary program, one which the bugs here have been ironed out, and that proceed smoothly and logically, and thus uninterestingly, toward inevitable conclusions — as Silicon Valley would (and will) require—but how much more interesting is the stumbling version here…

We even might imagine it to have been programmed by some post-Internet version of Beckett, and thus instilled with his tragicomic sense of stumbling through darkness, grasping for a meaning that is not there, but trying every combination nonetheless (in fact.. mention combinatoric passage from Watt)

It is perhaps this literary sensibility in the eteam’s work that I find so striking and unusual — their recent output includes novels and novellas as well. But what draws me most to their practice (as my own background is in creative writing), is the fluid and organic sense with which they integrate the literary into visual and conceptual work, resisting what I like to refer to as the ‘tryanny of the visual’, in their attempts to create new value (and to understand what value is) though the discarded, the forgotten, the ephemera of the modern world… —Daniel Howe