Lex Brown: The Glass Eye and Communication

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Tuesday, February 14 at 7pm for two films by multidisciplinary artist Lex Brown. The evening will commence with a screening of the film Communication (2021), followed by the world premiere of The Glass Eye (2023). Afterwards, Lex Brown will be in conversation with series curator Daniella Brito. This screening constitutes the first program in the three-part series What are you afraid of? taking place at e-flux Screening Room In February and March 2023. Read more on the series here. 

Across these two films, Brown converges the language of speculative fiction with theatrical strategies like satire and dark humor to chronicle a world governed by a fictional media conglomerate called Omnesia. Set in a vaguely distant future, the people of Earth no longer exist. The catalyst for their end appears to be late stage capitalism—a lecherous force that haunts and surveils in both films. In Communication, Omnesia workers—each of whom is a character performed by Brown herself—plot the displacement of the people of the fictional city, New Framingham. In The Glass Eye, Omnesia executives “delete” a woman that uncovers a range of human emotions, thought to be rendered obsolete. Disassociation plagues characters in both films: Protagonists Jordie and Coretta each grapple with their bifurcated selves, lost within the abyss of corporate control. 

Communication (2021, 30 minutes)
Part ode to Mystery Science Theater, this story begins in darkness, where unnamed characters watch a presentation at the planetarium about what happened to the stars—i.e. the people on Earth. Omnesia (Omni + amnesia), a fictional media conglomerate, has massive control over the lives of ordinary people. Aspen Van Der Baas, a gen-something girlboss, and Jordie, her techie right hand, render this world in a dark but silly satire as they attempt to dislocate the people in New Greater Framingham with assistance from their AI, Silvy. In the midst of this battleground emerges the voice of deeper consciousness, who gives a call, an instruction, to reorganize a power within. Collapsing the space of stage performance with the language of cinematic narrative and the logic of video art, this piece formally embodies the state of media convergence in which we currently live.

The Glass Eye (2023)
The Glass Eye is a sci-fi story about a woman, Coretta, who gets “deleted” by her corporate investors, Omnesia Media, after they acquire her project, The Catalog of Human Emotions. Her extra “accounts,” who appear as clones and have been watching Coretta through what they believe is a TV screen, realize they need to save her—and themselves—from a wasteland of images. 

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility            
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.          
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.          
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.