The King of the Stool Pigeons

Jenna Collins. Practice. Information.

The King of the Stool Pigeons (2025)

The King of the Stool Pigeons (2025)
Video 6:10

'The King of the Stool Pigeons' presents a monument to technological progress, emerging from a search for critical precedents that challenge its seemingly inevitable drive onwards. Built from short clips from the latter half of the 20th century, the work is narrated by an unidentified expert whose fictional reformulation of references produces a confident yet ridiculous stack of figures, objects, and scenarios. The work reflects on the impulses behind progress when presented as fact, questioning the hierarchies of power and influence that shape the discourse as polluting clouds gather overhead.
Commissioned: FluxusMuseum Prize for Experimental Video 2025
Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, DYCP

UPCOMMING: Screening 10/01/27

Classwaroom X Trades: Artists’ Moving Image Screening, selected by Georgina Starr, Arash Akbari & Natasha Rees, Trades, London (screening)

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

SWEDENBORG FILM FESTIVAL 2025 - selected and shortlisted for the prize screening (reversioned) Judges are writer and filmmaker CHRIS PETIT and Swedenborg Society’s President, the writer and chronicler of London, IAIN SINCLAIR

The Ballards and Damp and Buttery (2024)
Video 02:30

For JOAN Publishing veido series (online)

‘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.