The Myth of the Many in the One

Abstract

This artist project consists of the script and a selection of stills from The Myth of the Many in the One, an artist video produced in 2012. The script is composed from a redaction of business biographies in an attempt to decode the masculinist myth of the visionary, entrepreneurial genius – tech gurus such as Bob Noyce (1927–1990), Bill Gates (b. 1955), Steve Jobs (1955–2011) and others. It addresses these ideas of privilege and predestination by parsing the stories told of their formative boyhood years. Working on location in San Francisco and Silicon Valley with a child actor and a voice-over artist for this video, a peach orchard reminiscent of “The Valley of Heart's Delights” – how the area was known in the 1950s before the tech boom began – provides a significant mental and emotional backdrop to this narrative. The Myth of the Many in the One is the second part in Kennedy Browne's “Redaction Trilogy”, which explores the paradigm of early twenty-first-century capitalism. The first part, How Capital Moves (2010), interrogates labour, redundancy and outsourcing in early twenty-first-century tech manufacturing. Real World Harm (2018) is a 360° video experienced on an Oculus headset. It proposes a thought experiment concerning the digital rights of citizens, and the responsibilities of corporations managing and mining online identities and communities for profit.