An artist swaps her head with everyday objects in a musing on consumerism
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
videoProgress and modernity
Moving from Tibet to Beijing, Drolma reconciles big dreams with harsh realities
31 minutes
videoFilm and visual culture
Space and time expand, contract and combust in this propulsive animation
5 minutes
videoNature and landscape
‘A culture is no better than its woods’ – what our trees reveal about us, by W H Auden
5 minutes
videoSocial psychology
What happened when a crypto scam swept over a sleepy town in the Caucasus
18 minutes
videoBiology
Butterflies become unrecognisable landscapes when viewed under electron microscopes
4 minutes
videoHistory of technology
Curious singles and tech sceptics – what ‘computer dating’ looked like in 1966
6 minutes
videoTechnology and the self
The commodified childhood – scenes from two sisters’ lives in the creator economy
14 minutes
videoGender
A filmmaker responds to Lars von Trier’s call for a new muse with a unique application
16 minutes
videoAnimals and humans
Villagers struggle to keep their beloved, endangered ape population afloat
19 minutes