King of the Stool Pigeons

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JENNA COLLINS

The King of the Stool Pigeons (2025)

Video 7: 48

Commissioned: FluxusMuseum Prize for Experimental Video 2025
Exhibited: June - September 2025, Paros, Greece

‘The King of the Stool Pigeons' invites viewers to comment on the building of an absurd monument to scientific and technological progress. Built from short clips produced by institutions, organisations, and companies in the latter half of the 20th century, the construction is narrated by an unidentified expert and loosely based on the text accompanying Albrecht Dürer’s controversial 1525 design for a ‘Monument to the Vanquished Peasants.’ References from science and engineering are conflated with those from the arts in a hyperactive, fictional reformulation that assembles a confident yet ridiculous stack of figures, objects, and scenarios. ‘The King of the Stool Pigeons’ draws out the human impulses behind progress presented as fact, seeks out the affective precedents of developments such as A.I., and questions the hierarchies of power and influence that shape where we go next.

precursor:

The Ballards and Damp and Buttery (2024)

Video 02:30

Screened: JOAN publishing
Vocal Performance: Ben Spatz

‘The Ballards and Damp and Buttery’ folds three small sections of ‘Victory Monument to the Vanquishing of the Artists by the Engineers’ (included in ‘Wait With Your Friends and Do Your Best to Stay There’) into some of the material that shaped it, namely, sub broadcast recordings of lectures and discussions produced by the engineering departments of significant organisations and institutions. Built of text, wildly unstable and utterly unbuildable in any traditional sense, ‘Victory Monument to the Vanquishing of the Artists by the Engineers’ prematurely announces and undermines the win..