Smoke

https://foundation.app/@matthewweinstein

‘Smoke’ utilizes choreography, motion capture and cinematic lighting to portray the five minute duration of a cigarette.

‘Smoke’ evokes the pausing of time when thought becomes interior and nonlinear. In this timeless state, we are our most authentic, mysterious and unapproachable selves. What passes across our faces aren’t responses to events from outside, but from inside.

‘Smoke’ is an object of meditation.

The five minute seamless loop of ‘Smoke’ depicts the sensuality of a forbidden pleasure.

Smoke has been exhibited within my solo exhibition at the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, among other venues.

5:08 minute loop
1920 × 1080

Weinstein's work both enacts the fetish of the digital, as medium fetish, and comments on it. In doing so a way is found to look askance at the online, constructed, on-screen bodily condition. This work is certainly not pedagogic, and nor is it resistive exactly, but it is diagnostic and revalatory of ways in which a particular distribution of the sensible is currently operated and makes its appeal. By contrast, disregarding the imaginary, unable to deal with the fetish it enacts, hard medium materialism all too easily (not inevitably) does not interrogate, but simply drifts into alignment with, that vision of the future offered by industry. One of the odder things about the new media materialism is the extent to which, insisting on the material, it is in the end following the industry hype. Perhaps we might say it is dazzled by extent unreal objects. 

-Caroline Bassett

-exerpt from Digital Materialism: 'Six Handed , Machine-Assisted, Furious,' in the anthology, Thinking Art