Cruise Collision (2011-2013; 66 minutes) by Spencer Ashby is a feature-length video that attempts to blur aesthetics of various moving image tropes: cinema, music videos, pornography, home movies, advertising and video games. The film is set in a place that is chronologically and spatially eschew, where symbols of leisure and work, utopia and dystopia, comingle somewhere between dreams, memories, the self and its culture.

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Each character of the ensemble cast is an entertainer or artist naively struggling to come to terms with each of their already off-kilter realities. As a survey of footage, found and scripted, Cruise Collision is a journey through a society obsessed with the spectacle, speed, and machines; a self-aware “camera-ready” reality that looks for relations between real and representational things and the way they increasingly play off one another. The result is a critique of the mechanization of society and the loss of meaning that comes with the reproducibility of the industrial and technological revolutions.

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View trailer for Cruise Collision here.

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Spencer Ashby (b. 1990, Minneapolis) currently lives and works in Berlin. Ashby graduated from Parsons The New School in 2011 with a BFA in Photography and works in film and sculpture as well as a contributor for DIS Magazine and Novembre Magazine. He has participated in solo and group exhibitions at Gillmeier Reich (Berlin), Jack Chiles (New York), MAD Agency (Paris) and in Moving Image Panel for 89plus, organized by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Simon Castes and Kevin McGarry at the Palazio Grassi during the 2013 Venice Biennale.