Catching up with: The Future and Miranda July

Better late than never, finally got to see The Future by artist extraordinaire Miranda July, now streaming on Netflix, a strange, "Daliesque and Escherite" tale of contradictions, with a hero/anti-hero, dancer/anti-dancer, woman as type of codefied villain usually played by the man, lovers without sex and sex without love, disconnecting from the web to experiment with disconnecting from self, cheating vs. the forces of nature, a sad, infinitely mysterious ending rather than the closed door typical Hollywood happy finish, performance art unequaled before in its awkward grace, and so many other possible descriptions.

If I had not come across July's previous audio art, participatory and cinema work among many others available on the Internet, I might have stopped watching the film, but as always with July, I came out with a better sense of shared humanity and a rekindled sense of absurd beauty.

July, whose many notable achievements include getting the simple, nostalgic tumblr/instagram look for the web before it hit the masses, and also turning project participants into artists forever on display at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art with the aughts Learning to Love You More web project.

Another fascinating work where she showcased her ability to literally hit you in the head with poetically strange and postwardly obvious statements was this The Hallway exhibit experienced here in video walk-through.

The Hallway from The Hallway on Vimeo.