Every Body is Heavy
Film, 18:40
In ‘Every Body is Heavy’, Aleks Stanek brings to digital life two distinct anonymous entities. Targeted by an anti-virus scan within a surveillance system overlooking the cliffs of Calais and Dover, the entities converse about the power dynamics of sexualities, bodies and environments. Gender-fluid - or even genderless - they consider the politics of spectatorship, implicating the viewer in hierarchies of visual and other consumptions both within and outside of the work. Filmed almost exclusively with drones, ‘Every Body is Heavy’ builds on a proposed reality conceptualised by the artist in previous works, where discarded technology and electronics merge with AI and the so-called god particle understood to grant objects mass - or, speculatively, logic or sentience.
The filming and production of ‘Every Body is Heavy’ were made possible with the support of EJ O’Reilly (production assistance), Gabriella Davies (music arrangement), Mike Wyeld (sound mixing), Roddy Cañas (sound suite) and Gill Dibben (special effects assistance).