“Six months ago we bought an Acre of Land on ebay. We paid $700 via PayPal but never got the deed. Ebay didn’t care, PayPal didn’t care. We were on our own. Who are you, we wondered? We thought about it, speculated, and then on July 31st, 2013 we set out to find you.”

Eteam’s video Space Delay chronicles a foreign family’s search for a piece of the American Dream. They had virtually bought land, but never got it. If something as real and present as land never becomes present, what is present then? As they set out to chase the eBay sellers – first online, on YouTube, Facebook, flicker, yelp, tumblr, Kickstarter, indiegogo, instagram and then in real time, from New Mexico, to Colorado, Utah and Arizona the followers realize that they are always behind. Or that something is always behind them, that they are leading an after-life fueled with anxieties, dreams, cultural baggage and stereotypes that flare up and go into remission.

“Privacy has been abolished. Our cores are cracked open. We are sitting in an open pit of landscape and fail in plain sight. We don’t take any risks, we don’t do silly things, we don’t explore any boundaries. We are hollowed-out, we are silently going extinct, but we don’t complain. Because we are doing it comfortably.  We drive all day and into the night. We go extinct in a car with cup holders and air conditioning, we abolish life in a hotel with wifi and an indoor pool. And the next morning we get up, find the piece of land and wait for them, so they can record our presence and verify our existence, while we start to modify the possibilities of what this could be, if it wouldn’t be us, but someone else.”

Videomaker and film scholar Jim Supanick, who also serves as a member of our advisory board, will join Franziska Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger of eteam in conversation after the program.

“One of the most terrestrial exchanges between humans – the sale of a plot of land – is the beginning of a bizarre American odyssey when the artist duo eteam buys an acre of the Southwestern desert on eBay. The deed never arrives in the mail, so eteam attempts to track down the phantom seller, a porous Internet characters operating as Larry and Radonna, Eclectic Treasure Collection, or the Barefoot Shaman. A virtual search for them turns actual when eteam travels to confront him in person, children in tow. Their first destination is a suspicious little house in Colorado where no one, thankfully, answers the door. From there the family embarks on a peculiar road trip through the indelible landscape of the American west, with its forlorn chain hotels and abandoned pool patios, over-bright restaurants and otherworldly geological formations. Larry the Barefoot Shaman becomes an allegory for the Information Age, his shadowy digital existence contrasted by the overwhelming physical presence of the Grand Canyon, the Crater Fields, the Painted Desert. In this setting, caught up in a hopeless pursuit, the family feels more acutely foreign and unmoored, guided by ghosts and haunted by cultural associations that are increasingly surreal. At last, they arrive at their single acre of desert. The family camps there for three days, until two Navajo County Sheriffs crash into their obsessive fever dream. Writing up paperwork in their air-conditioned sedan, the officers reduce the family to its informational constitution, while also vividly punctuating Space Delay’s strange post-human Western.” — Rebecca Cleman, Distribution Director of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI).

Space Delay has been shown in 2017 at:
Anthology Film Archives, NY
Aurora Picture Show, Houston, TX
Alamo Drafthouse Ritz, Austin, TX

Since 2001 eteam (Franziska Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger) traffic in transience. At the intersection of relational aesthetics, the Internet and land art, eteam coordinates collective happenings and conceptual transactions between the earthly plane and the realms of the interweb, often reconstructed in hypnotic video work, radio plays, or more recently novellas and novels. Their projects have been featured at PS1 NY, MUMOK Vienna, Centre Pompidou Paris, Transmediale Berlin, Taiwan International Documentary Festival, New York Video Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, the 11th Biennale of Moving Images in Geneva, among many others.

They have received grants from Art in General, NYSCA, NYFA, Rhizome, Creative Capital and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and were residents at the CLUI, Taipei Artist Village (TAV), Eyebeam, Smack Mellon, Yaddo and the Mac Dowell Colony. In 2017 they received a digital commission by Artport, The Whitney Museums portal to Digital Art. Currently they are in residence at the Hong Kong Baptist University in Hong Kong. Their novel “OS Grabeland” will be published by Nightboat Books in 2018.

Jim Supanick is a videomaker and writer born in Cleveland, Ohio, and living in Brooklyn. Forthcoming videos include a long-term project titled “Seed Sold Back to the Farmer”, a two-part animated essay about the assembly line and its legacy of damage, as well as a re-edited segment of Caspar Stracke’s “Circle’s Short Circuit” (featuring an interview with Avital Ronell). He has received support from NYSCA, the Puffin Foundation, and the Experimental Television Center. His essays on film, video, and visual culture have appeared in such publications as Film Comment, Millennium Film Journal, The Wire, Cineaste, and The Brooklyn Rail, along with exhibition catalogs and with DVD releases. He is the recipient of a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and a NYFA Grant for Nonfiction Literature. He is also a member of Synthhumpers, a quasi-musical collaboration with Josh Solondz. Jim currently teaches at City College of New York.