VIDEO POST relaunches Mortal Combat by Samuel Brzeski, a play on the video game title of the same name, critiques practices of compulsive list-making and neoliberal productivity drives. The work presents a way in which the visitor can ‘read’ books from a definitive ‘100 Books to Read Before You Die’ checklist through the speed reading application Spreeder. Each of the 100 books are delivered one word at a time at the application’s highest setting of 5000 words per minute, a speed at which practitioners of speedreading claim to be able to read. The 24 kindles contain between one and five books each, streaming out at the viewer in a loop. The text is barely legible at this speed, a ghost image.
Samuel Brzeski, Mortal Combat, 2022
24 Amazon Kindle Fire 7 tablets, mounted onto a steel frame | Presented within the solo exhibition Performance anxiety at Babel Visnigrom
image (cover 1): Samuel Brzeski, Mortal Combat, 2022, installation view from the solo exhibition Performance anxiety at Babel Visningsrom, ph: Susann Jamtøy