🎶
Hot liquid
Makes us fast
Combustion
Will this last?
Cylinders inhale
They go: boom boom
Liquid in the tank
Liquid on the road
Pipes exhale the storm
It goes: vroom vroom
How much of it’s owned
Speculative debt?
Soaking on the streets
We are so wet
Accelerate the turn
Wreckage let it burn
I know you can feel it
🎶
Turbo is a tragic film about life after The Great Recession of 2007/08.
On a stormy night in 2007, a teenage boy named Brett ‘Turbo’ Matthews lost control of his sports car and drove off the side of a cliff. Turbo descended through the air and crashed into a building housing financial instruments. He was killed upon impact and his body was unidentifiable amongst the burning car wreckage. That same night, financial markets began to crash becoming what we now know as The Great Recession. The reconstruction and resurrection of global financial institutions by state governments during The Great Recession would have the unintended consequence of also reconstructing and resurrecting Turbo. Although spared from death, Turbo was now cursed to live with the behavioral impulses of a sports car. In the day time, Turbo lives in frustration because he can only communicate through car sounds that he makes with his mouth. In the night time, Turbo enters into hallucinations where he is free to drive however these hallucinations always end with a car accident.
Turbo exists as a 20 minute film in 4K resolution with a suite of 40x50” photographs and an official soundtrack.
Turbo began as a desire to reflect upon my formative teenage years during The Great Recession. It was a time in which I experienced a force that I could not comprehend yet I could witness its effects. Belonging to a family of workers, The Great Recession manifested itself in my family through unemployment, a shorter working week, and a pervasive neurosis. The Great Recession was a hailing moment in which capitalism classified myself within a larger structure of capitalist social relations. A decade onwards, the production period and setting of Turbo, not much has improved for my family, myself, and the workers of the world.
On YouTube I found videos of boys and young men who have the astonishing capability to uncannily recreate the sounds of sports cars with their mouths. Judging from the clothes that they wear and glimpses of their home in the background of their videos, my prejudice leads me to believe these people are also workers. As workers existing in the current state capitalism, the chances are grim for these boys and young men to acquire the sport cars that they desire. In light of their socio-economic circumstance, these people have instead become the cars that they desire through brief performances of the vehicles. With these performances they briefly acquire the symbolic powers promised to them by the sports cars. My theory is that these performances are just a further development of the alienation of the proletariat within the commodities that they produce. A development of commodity fetishism, from losing oneself to the commodities one produces into becoming the commodities that one produces.
The genesis of Turbo came from a failed 1980s children’s cartoon called ‘Turbo Teen’. In this cartoon, an affluent teenager named Brett ‘Turbo’ Matthews loses control his sports car on a stormy night. He flies off a cliff and crashes into a building housing technologies that fuses his body with his car. Brett Matthews is able to escape death by transforming into sports car. The plot of this cartoon was provocative to me. Brett Matthews was 14 at the time of his crash event and I was 14 during my ‘crash’ event: The Great Recession. From here the logic of my Turbo is crystallized. My character is transformed into car through behavioral impulses. As such, the video is largely unintelligible because it is communicated through the sounds of sports cars performed with my mouth, which comes from a desire to create a fake foreign film. The exaggerated inclusion of fire imagery in Turbo is a metaphor for the economic acronym ‘FIRE’, Finance Insurance and Real Estate, which was the culprit sector involved in The Great Recession.
Turbo has been designed to be presented as an installation. The cyclical nature of the video is meant to be presented over-and-over again as a looped video. The formal mechanism of the loop, that forces the events in my video to repeat endlessly, is a strategic metaphor to the continual booms-and-busts of the crises-seeking logic of capitalism.
Brett ‘Turbo’ Matthews
1993 - 2007
May you R.I.P.
(race in paradise)
🥀🏁🥀🏁🥀🏁🥀
🎶 . . . Accelerate the turn
Wreckage let it burn . . .🎶
