Adam Cruces
Patience

One of the American artist Adam Cruces’s main interests is the specific aesthetics of the digital world. In the video loop Patience, he shows the face of a computer-generated beauty. Her features remain immobile, while the hypnotic waves of a Mac-OS screensaver move up and down in her hollowed-out eyes. On her forehead, the rainbow-colored Mac wait cursor – which appears, e.g., before an especially large data file opens – spins incessantly. In the background, the sound of a rebooting Mac OS is repeated over and over. The only animated aspect of the object facing us is the dynamic vocabulary of those software functions that are supposed to ease our waiting: waiting for the system to start up, waiting for the file to open and waiting till the keyboard can be activated again. Cruces plays here with our fascination for parallel digital worlds, in which life time is substituted by virtual time. It’s about the promise of making contact, which is indicated by the cropped proximity and frontality of the face, as well as by the position of the mouth – slightly open as if to speak. This promise, though constantly postponed, seems to be within reach behind the sightless eyes, if only we have enough patience. 
(Text: Bettina Back)