2018
HD video, loop
The “Coin Test China High-Speed Rail” video is an Internet phenomenon that started in 2015 in response to China’s ongoing investment in high-speed rail infrastructure across Asia and Europe as part of its Belt and Road Initiative. In each of these videos, often captured by a tourist or foreign traveller using one of many high-speed rail networks built by a Chinese state-owned company, a standing coin is balanced on the ledge of the train window to test the train’s stability. Due to its thickness, the coin of choice in these videos is often the 2-euro coin, resulting in an image that fortuitously appears to confirm the stabilising presence of the (Chinese) state against the volatility of (European) financial capitalism.
In ULTIMATE COIN TEST CHINA HIGH-SPEED RAIL, the video is reproduced as a looping 3D simulation in which the coin never falls. Invoking the new fetish of stability amidst the ongoing crisis of capitalism, the video further alludes to the technological fantasy of the perpetual motion machine and its utopian imaginary that holds up technology as the ultimate solution to any intractable contemporary problem.