There are times when words fail, when images speak best of their own lot. Hence the video essay, a form that links critical discourse to visual practice. Ursula Biemann, a Swiss–based artist and curator, has made much of this form, focusing on gender relations in transnational space, but relying on inspired visual tropes to carry her arguments forward. In Writing Desire (2000, 23 mins), Biemann surfs the Web looking at the global trade in women's bodies. This is couched as a digital agora, marketing mail–order brides and "pen pals" from impoverished countries. Biemann doesn't stop with regurgitating new versions of an old transaction. Rather she explores the exchange of desire along the Internet as a style of "writing" toward arousal. The essay itself takes on the gaze of an Internet shopper searching for a Web–wise mate. Remote Sensing (2001, 53 mins) steps back, using satellite imaging and global positioning data as metaphors for the international trafficking of sex workers. Here, global politics concerning immigration promotes a nomadic flow of displaced women. Slaves to both gender and economy, these women, many from Southeast Asia, find their mobility to be little more than the manacles of the marketplace. Like Writing Desire, Remote Sensing maps the "parasitic networks" of sexual exchange in the digital age.