How do we arrange ourselves? How are we arranged? And how can one visualize the answers to these questions? Clemens von Wedemeyer’s new film delves into the question of the networked dimension of our existence and grapple with how to represent it.

Wedemeyer’s film, Surface Composition, illustrates the contemporary platforms on which people arrange themselves and by which they are arranged.

Traveling in California, he recorded sites possessed of real-world network power like the headquarters of Apple, Meta, Amazon, Space X, and the United States Postal Service, as well as infrastructures of commerce, containers, mines, and other motifs, in impersonal documentary images. They show the nondescript building complexes of systemically relevant companies, empty streets, a few transport vehicles. The reality of today’s networks is opaque; their phenomenological blankness becomes manifest in the additive editing, sustained by a psychedelic soundtrack supplied by the Hungarian improvisational musician Zsolt Sőrés.

Conventional principles of the representation of power (and the mass) have been turned upside down in the networked feudalism of our days. The more influential the actors and structures, the places and processes are, the more invisible they seem to be.