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This video documents the guerrilla performance titled "#1 Jobs Creator" performed outside the State Theatre, Ann Arbor, MI in October 2015. The performance was timed to begin as the audience left the theatre from the sneak preview advanced screening of the film "Steve Jobs" (2015). In the performance, I simulate a live birth using a doll with a print of Steve Job's face crudely taped to it.
This performance was a perverse inversion of Steve Job's iconic "product releases". Instead of unveiling a new iPhone, this time it is Mr. Jobs himself who is reproduced: newer, thinner, more innovative versions of himself than even before. Instead of a polished and scripted product release onstage to an audience of investors, the product release in this performance takes place on the concrete under the street lights as cars and pedestrians go about their night. Instead of pre-programmed music and slick production effects, this release is accompanied by the droning and harsh sounds of accordions, crooning vocals, keyboard organ, street percussion, and ambient noise. This is the world we are born into in all of its zigzagging harshness, frayed and jagged at the edges; not a world of zen-like creative contemplation contained within smooth rounded corners that the utopic aesthetic and corporate cult narrative of Apple and Mr. Jobs would have you believe.
A NOTE ON THE PERFORMANCE + DOCUMENTATION:
The only marketing that accompanied this otherwise spontaneous performance was a Facebook event cryptically hosted and announced by Wifi Shrine, an internet avatar I created for various events and performances between 2015-2017. The dissemination of the video documentation was subsequently done anonymously through Wifi Shrine's Facebook and Youtube profiles.
A NOTE ON WIFI SHRINE:
I perform the character of Wifi Shrine through the medium of Facebook. Wifi Shrine is a spammy self-promoter, who may or may not be a bot, and is unaware of their crude aesthetic and spelling errors. Through the digital puppet of Wifi Shrine, I hold up a mirror to social media and how we communicate and form identity within it. I also go on to complicate the discrete order of online personas by providing the password and email for others to use Wifi Shrine's account and online identity as their own, therefore stimulating questions of truth and authenticity as it relates to social media.
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