THE VOYEUR OF UTTER DESTRUCTION (AS BEAUTY)
The Voyeur Of Utter Destruction (As Beauty) is a new interactive video-game installation by digital art collective WERC. The work allows you to buy an explosion and drop it on a city. The more you pay the bigger the explosion.
The installation asks questions about the spectacle of mass destruction in our popular culture and entertainment compared to the real life images we see everyday on the news.
We have a conflicting obsession with the excessive violence of destruction. Violence and destruction is something we as a society disapprove of or see as a necessary evil. But in movies, series and video games, explosions are extensively glorified with slow-motion shots where the camera lingers and shows it from all angles. Modern software used to create video games and special effects are optimized to develop stunning explosions as quickly as possible. Which is not surprising: the demand is huge. With this installation, we aspire for the audience to question their relationship with destruction as entertainment. How ethical is it to enjoy the spectacle of an explosion? Why do we so enjoy watching mass destruction of objects? And is it okay for an artist to make their money this way? The power to single-handedly undo something that has taken thousands of people years to build solves an inherent desire to have influence in a world in which we are powerless.
