A large part of this piece responds to Zygmunt Bauman's Liquid Modernity, a critical text which argues that the heavy hand of mid-century modernism has given way to a subtler system of hegemony. Networked technologies, as Bauman argues, have let systems of power abandon the blunt social disciplining in favour  of unaccountability and invisibility.

This change, Bauman theorizes, has created a new model of power—nomadic, shape-shifting and fundamentally liquid, which relocates and restructures itself in the face of challenge. This newmodernity, he states, takes business as its central logic, refusing any other system of criteria.

Bauman argues that this power structure holds hegemony over everydomain of human affairs, meaning any norms, boundaries andinstitutions that encumber the market-driven shift of social arrangements must be dissolved. The result, Bauman theorizes, is asocial reality in which nothing is stable or permanent—everythingis transitory, liquid, and contingent.

In arguing for the impermanence and instability of digital objects and experiences, Residuul adapts Bauman's ideas to the narrower domain of digitality. Furthermore, by considering digital artifacts as the products of economic actors, Residuul gestures towards how market imperatives generate a constant flux in the use, form and effects of digital objects.

Bauman's ideas appear to make an appearance in Hito Steyerl's"Liquidity, Inc.", a video essay centered on the story of Jacob Woods, a finance worker who became a mixed martial arts competitor after losing his job in the 2008 financial crisis.

Steyerl's work makes persistent allusions to the ways one must adapt to shifting economic and political circumstances. She drives at liquid modernity through the literal metaphor of liquids, playfully adopting weather reports, natural disaster simulations, and Bruce Lee quotes to communicate this point.

Residuul adapts Steyerl's metaphors to portraya landscape forsaken by liquid modernity—dry seabeds, from which the liquidity has evaporated and flowed elsewhere. It also adopts Steyerl's design of the video space, in which static objects adorn and comment on the content communicated by the screen. In Steyerl's case, it is a large, wave-shaped structure in which the audience sits, whereas in Residuul's case, it is a group of plinths bearing a selection of smart devices portrayed in the video.

This project also draws on more conventional anglestowards the digital economy. In "The Dynamics of Silicon Valley," economists Doug Henton and Kim Held frame the startup and venture capital landscape of Silicon Valley through sociologist Joseph Schumpeter's notion of 'creative destruction,'analogous to Bauman's liquid modernity.

What characterizes Silicon Valley, they argue, is not just its capacity for financial growth, but also its resilience to crisis.Henton and Held argue that the Valley has developed a culture entirely centered on risk.Residuul focuses on the debris of this culture, drawing on what gets left behind as tech industries pivot to meet market demand.

Scholar Nick Srnicek makes an in-depth description of the Valley's most recent bet in Platform Capitalism. Thistext forms a different kind of critique of the tech industry. Rather than framing tech companies as]cultural or political actors, Srnicek approaches them as economic actors,whose sociopolitical interactions stem from navigating the market economy.

What Srnicek says echoes Bauman's position: business has become the logic. His target is the proliferation of steeply-discounted digital services like Amazon and Facebook and the concomitant smart object boom they have funded. These 'platforms,' Srnicek argues, stem from a new mode of business: outwardly, an infrastructure for exchange, but internally, a tool for the extraction and control of data.

Srnicek also argues that many platforms—even large ones like Uber—almost universally lack profitability in the present tense, and questions their structural integrity and resilience to economic shocks.This was the starting point for Residuul, and the origin point for its emphasis on the debris trail of data-driven starutps.

To communicate these notions and ideas, this piece draws on methodologies drafted out in theorist Daphne Dragona's essay, "What is Left to Subvert?" In this text, Dragona proposes techniques of'soft subversion'—methods of artistic resistance that mirror the distributed, liquidand'soft' forms of power surrounding digitality.

Prevalent among these ideas is playwright Bertolt Brecht's notion of entfremdung,or alienation, which 'makes strange' of the ordinary so it can be seen and considered with fresh eyes. Residuul draws on this idea by placing startup aesthetics in ruins—the shattered and bricked e-waste of smart devices mingling with flat design of the risk in the startup world.

Dragona's take on alienation can be seen in Andrew Norman Wilson's "Stock Fantasy Ventures," an online stock footage company which also doubles as an artwork. As a business, Stock Fantasy's clients fund the production of speculative image concepts in exchange for rights to its profits as stock footage and on the art market. These image concepts tend to take on a sordid tone, reflecting post-Recession economic realities.  Wilson's adoption of stock footage aesthetics offers a model for Residuul's dive into corporate aesthetics—it offers a model for referring an entity by its aesthetics, then commenting on that entity by misusing those aesthetics.