meet xander
Founded by a disgraced Olympian, the Passed Lives' Excessive Future Foundation is a nomadic cult-like organization dedicated to exploring liminal technologies of health, disappearance, and ritual. Members wear brightly colored running suits (red, blue, yellow) and engage in endless movement across America. The Foundation operates through satellite corporations such as the Premonition Bureau, the Underworld Construction Company, and the Unicorn Balloon Company, weaving together myth, technology, and alternative realities…
Meet Xander, 2016: Xander is an ascender member in the Passed Lives' Excessive Future Foundation, and their birthday is just around the corner… so they are thinking about having some fun…
“I maybe one to
want
but not wander
yet I can’t live
without
the mouth of
xander”
Mouth of Xander is a single-channel video that examines the mouth as both a site of language and a threshold of subjectivity. By isolating and magnifying this fragment of the body, the work destabilizes the familiar relationship between voice, identity, and image. The act of speaking is rendered uncanny—simultaneously intimate and estranged—drawing attention to the materiality of language as gesture rather than transparent communication. In its reduction of the body to a partial object, the piece anticipates later investigations into disappearance, fragmentation, and perceptual rupture, positioning the voice not as a guarantor of presence but as a spectral trace.
“ everyone likes to
have fun …
and you will too.”
Pen Test is a single-channel video filmed on VHS that stages a surreal performance of utility and play. A hand in a blue jumpsuit holds a floating pen against a chroma-key background, intermittently clicking it open and closed as though conducting an experiment. Overlaid text scrolls across the screen, listing SKU identification numbers for consumer products, including an inflatable pool, barbecue sauce, mustard, and ketchup. The juxtaposition suggests a set of deadpan “instructions” for new alternatives to fun—like bathing in condiments—where leisure is reframed as absurd consumption. By combining outdated technology, minimalist gesture, and retail codes, the work destabilizes distinctions between function, pleasure, and spectacle, positioning the everyday as a site for both parody and critical investigation.