Artist Statement

The e studios Remix — Artist's Statement (draft v1)

In March 2023 an account called e studios bought every ad slot on Twitter for a month to

show a forty-second video: a bassist playing over footage of New York Stock Exchange

listing ceremonies — Ferrari to Snap to the great flood of 2021, ending with Grindr, listed

the week FTX died — and then thirteen seconds of flags, and silence. The account never

posted again. No one knows who made it, though its parent's banner hangs quietly in the

seventh second, cut in with the same grammar as the tenants it landlords. I have watched

it several hundred times. It felt, I wrote at the time, like a message I had been waiting

my whole life to receive and transmit.

This is the transmission.

The classical art of memory, as Frances Yates reconstructed it, worked by architecture:

you fixed a building in your mind, walked it in one unchangeable order, and at each

station — each locus — you placed a vivid image. The building never changes; the images

do the remembering. This film is a memory palace for a mania. One building. One walk the

camera cannot revise — the vantage is fixed forever at the point where someone actually

stood. Thirty-eight loci, one per jump cut. And at every locus, an image made as vivid as

I could make it: the temple in tulip-time oils, Nubank on Red Square, DoorDash's workers

grinning the fixed grin of the mural, the kick in plasticine, a victory screen that

misspells its own tagline the way its era misspelled everything.

Every style predates 2008. That is the argument. A single filter is a filter; thirty-eight

of them are a claim: that this bubble could only be seen by media older than the world

it wrecked — by everything that watched it arrive. The eras take turns rendering the same

forty seconds, and each one tells you what it sees: the newsreel prophesies, the noir

convicts, technicolor denies, the cartoons remember it as childhood, the consoles score

it as a game somebody won. The brands lose their colors first and their letters last.

Three ceremonies in the source are already unidentifiable; their bells ring for no one

anyone can name, and the film lets them stay lost.

Under it all, the original audio, untouched: twenty-seven seconds of compressed groove —

no dynamics, nothing permitted to fall — with the exchange's own bell mixed in as

percussion. Then the bell stops first, the bass decays alone, and the film ends the way

the era did: not a bang but a long fade — and in the final cut, the medium itself burns,

frame by frame, until there is only blank leader. All that is solid melts into air; the

confetti was always an expenditure; the ceremony was always a rite. The flags outlast

every name draped beneath them, and then they don't.

Rendered March–July 2026 with the generative tools contemporary to the source — the

flicker is period. Later versions in later media will join it, the way restorations join

a print. The palace stands. Walk it in order.

— the author