Liquidity Inc. is a multilayered portrait of Jacob Wood, a financial analyst who lost his job in the economic crash of
2008 and became a career mixed-martial-arts fighter. Wood’s story unfolds through real and virtual worlds that
are made to overlap, combining conventions of documentary film with Internet syntax—hashtags, GIFs, and memes.
With its computer-generated waves and news footage of hurricanes and tsunamis, the work uses water and extreme
weather as metaphors for the fluidity of financial assets and digital information, and for a collective sense of instability.

Conflating terms from meteorology, geopolitics, and digital culture, masked forecasters wryly suggest that weather
patterns are determined by our own emotional states. You are invited to sit on the architectural structure, lined with
judo mats, which the artist has compared to a raft wrecked by a raging storm.

Gallery label from

2019

Medium Video (color, sound; 30 min.) and architectural environment
Dimensions Dimensions variable
Credit Gift of the artist
Object number 1352.2016
Department Media and Performance

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Hito Steyerl

German, born 1966 5 works online

Artist, theoretician, and educator Hito Steyerl has wondered, “Are people hidden by too many images? . . . Do they become images?

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