Starting from a corner of YouTube in which users deploy all sorts of spiritual tricks to get rich, Jared Marks, via his alter ego Cyber Jaya, meditates on the borders between economy, spirituality and ecology in the video collage Money is a wonderful friend of mine and we are always together (2020). The work begins with Cyber Jaya himself meditating from an offshore tax haven, moves through a chanted excerpt of a Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen text and winds up in an anonymous hotel conference room where a New Age Evangelist divulges the secrets to winning the lottery. The various methods depicted reflect attempts by those who experience such economic precarity that they are left with no other choice than to ascend to a metaphysical plane. Capitalist desires run so deep that they invade the sacred realm of enlightenment to achieve “success” which appears less like nirvana and more like ecological catastrophe.

Money is a wonderful friend of mine and we are always together
2020