Summary

Pink Slime Caesar Shift: Gold Loop reflects on the disappearance of labor activists in China, the resulting possibilities of political resistance, and e-waste (old computers, cell phones, and other domestic electronics). Firsthand accounts of female electronics workers in South China are cut together with corporate and industrial texts to investigate the physical, legal, and biochemical realities of gold extraction from e-waste. Live action video and animation explore the psychogeography of “virtuous” first-world recycling vs third-world biopolitical devastation. Themes of mirroring, mutation, and disintegration are grounded in considering electronics that poison bodies in their initial production as well as in their return for disassembly, an infernal eternal return, a “gold loop.”