Amazon Woman offers an amusingly surreal take on mindless materialism and instant gratification readymade for our age of inexhaustible online shopping. For the piece, the Vienna-based multimedia artist Anna Vasof creates a series of ‘head-missing magic tricks’ wherein she digitally trades her own head with parts of everyday objects, including a smartphone, a teabag and a vacuum cleaner. Filmed during lockdown periods in 2020 and 2021 – a time when dependence on Amazon.com was at an all-time high for many people around the globe – each vignette is entertaining yet also somewhat discomforting, hinting at the trade-offs inherent to all-consuming consumerism.
Director: Anna Vasof
video
Family life
The precious family keepsakes that hold meaning for generations
10 minutes
video
Neuroscience
This intricate map of a fruit fly brain could signal a revolution in neuroscience
2 minutes
video
Archaeology
What did the first people who entered Tutankhamun’s tomb see?
5 minutes
video
Information and communication
Coverage of the ‘balloon boy’ hoax forms a withering indictment of for-profit news
17 minutes
video
Childhood and adolescence
Marmar is living through a devastating war – but she’d rather tell you about her new dress
8 minutes
video
Meaning and the good life
Wander through the English countryside with two teens trying to make sense of the world
10 minutes
video
Computing and artificial intelligence
The ‘cloud’ requires heaps of energy to stay aloft. Could synthetic DNA be the answer?
12 minutes
video
Art
A puppeteer makes sense of an overwhelming world by shrinking it down to size
5 minutes
video
History
There are fragments of Romani Gypsy history all over the UK – if one knows where to look
3 minutes