The video fetish finger combines experimental video clips, that deal with the complexity of haptic perception in the context of screen based digital media. Through digitalization and the associated dematerialization of objects, the longing for haptic perception often increases. The moving images are associatively concerned with contact at the interface between the physical and the virtual, activeness and passiveness.
In addition to images of gestures and actions, 3D animations and photographs, video clips of so called „Food Diaries“ are included in the work, in which the daily diet of various individuals is filmed and then uploaded to Youtube. Formally, the video „Fetish Finger“ is read as if scrolling down a webpage. The narrative takes place from top to bottom.
Fetish Finger
"Media images of the self are the fetishes of digital culture. Whether it is one’s own cat, the body mutated into an optimizable surface, or a cooking pot – they all serve the subject culture of selfies.
With Susanna Flock’s video FETISH FINGER we scroll slowly through this image culture of the present. The depiction of the hand here, the ultimate symbol of DIY culture, is especially convincing.
This arrangement dramatizes how we – having become objects ourselves – desperately attempt to make contact with ourselves. The pictured touch of the touchscreen and the invisible interface illustrate how the self struggles to cope with the gap between materiality and virtuality. FETISH FINGER is a colorful, sometimes absurd and, most of all, refreshingly non-moralizing commentary on this new fetish culture."
(jury statement Crossing Europe 2017)