A Brief Overview of the Stuntman Economy

About A Brief Overview of the Stuntman Economy”:

“A Brief Overview of the Stuntman Economy” is a book project by Kitchener-based multidisciplinary artists Jacob Irish and Lauren Prousky. It is fabricated historical account of an economic system in which all undesirable labor is outsourced to a personal Stuntman, creating an infinite chain of employer/employee relationships.

The first part is written as an academic paper published centuries after the system’s collapse. It outlines how technological acceleration and social normalization bolstered by vague bureaucratic oversight gave rise to this economy. The second half of the work is a recovered journal (a relic) belonging to an “average” Stuntman. Through first person accounts of courtroom observations, childcare, job loss, medical procedures and grief, the relic undermines the supposed neutrality of the system established in part one to explore the psychological byproduct of a completely bifurcated existence.  

Combined, the two parts implement late-capitalist logic to imagine a world where life is flattened into a series of transferable tasks and inconvenience itself becomes the only profession. The result is a quietly tragic satire about how the systemic outsourcing of human experiences distorts and destabilizes the self.