Joshua Alexander is an artist and filmmaker. His practice explores the use of experimental moving image to disrupt corporate digital content. His film work has been shown at the Whitechapel Gallery, London Short Film Festival, and Modern Art Oxford. Awards include Best Film at Swedenborg Film Festival 2022 and Best Editing at Exit 6 Film Festival 2022.
Title of thesis: Haunting the Corporate World: Using experimental moving image to destabilise capitalist reality
Joshua's practice-as-research project is a pioneering interrogation of the ‘corporate video’ using experimental moving image. His research aims to cause an unravelling of the ideological world of ‘capitalist reality’ that is interwoven with the audio-visual formal structures of corporate digital content. Using green-screen technology and digital compositing to create idiosyncratic audio-visual language which form echo-reflections of the corporate world, his practice explores the troubled territory of the psychological space occupied by ‘corporate reality’. In his research, he looks at the corporate world through the lens of Mark Fisher’s writing on capitalist realism and Federico Campagna’s writing on Technic’s ‘reality-settings’; using experimentation with digital video forms to question the way economic ideology invisibly structures 'reality'. His moving image work aims to create an ‘un-familiarisation’ in the audio-visual representation of the corporate world; disrupting the omnipresence of managerialism and neoliberal bureaucracy by causing these structures to appear absurd and unfamiliar; as well as ‘haunting’ (destabilising) corporate self-representation through parody of digital content.
Supervisors: Dr Fred Dalmasso and Professor Claire Warden.