Excerpt: Swipe Right for mob.io: On Joel Sherwood Spring’s SETTLED

In SETTLED, Sherwood Spring speaks via a proxy, like a ventriloquist. The actress Priya Leigh, playing the young professional (comms-girlie), gives an outstanding performance of the influence of the technical image on bodies.

In much the same way that TikTok dances have evolved to imitate the smooth, glossy movements made possible by the app’s editing tools, Priya’s performance is a simulacrum of “deepfake” videos — puppetry in the age of neural media.

Indigeneity is constantly subject to the pressures of a colonial framework: pressures to perform a certain way, to fit certain categories. The everyday strata of capture by performance — think the stratified drop lists of identity categories in dating apps.

Under these stifling yet insidious restrictions (algorithmic incentives, shadowbans), trolling becomes a strategy of doublespeak. When someone speaks, or is spoken to, in bad faith, normative communication breaks down. It ceases to be a two-way street, and you’re forced to read around the text, to seek alternative strategies of interpretation.

Sherwood Spring’s work demands a hermeneutics of suspicion.