THE VOYEUR OF UTTER DESTRUCTION (AS BEAUTY)
The Voyeur Of Utter Destruction (As Beauty) is a work in progress. The installation is slated to release in 2025.
We have a conflicting obsession with the excessive violence of destruction. Violence through 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? 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.
MEDIA
For our obsession with violence, we don’t have to look farther than modern cinema. Just look at the most popular movies of all time: Both James Cameron Avatar movies culminate in battlefield to solve all the problems, all Marvel movies revolve purely around superheroes who can solve all the world’s problems with fists, guns and deadly lasers, even the love story of Titanic culminates in the final scene where the audience can voyeuristically, and in great detail, watch a ship go down and take thousands of people with it.
USER JOURNEY
A dark room, one wall is completely projected: a city at sunset quietly rotates past the audience on the projection. It is a generic metropolis composed of skyscrapers and residential neighborhoods reminiscent of big cities without direct reference to any of them. It is an anonymous city as we seem to know so many of. In the middle of the space is a payment terminal. The audience chooses an amount via the payment terminal and charges it with their debit card. After you’ve paid, a bomb drops, it’s silent for a moment. Then the explosion. The size changes depending on how much you paid. We see the fireball rise upward in slow motion and the debris of surrounding buildings fall over through the smoke. The explosion dissipates, only the rubble remains.
