purgatory EDIT
A user-generated montage-based VR experience and cinematic installation, built on an archive of moving images representative of histories of violence.
purgatory EDIT is a user-generated, montage-based, cinematic experience.
In an undisclosed future where no humans are alive, time-travelling entities journeyed across time-space to collect and categorise the most continuous history of human beings: histories of violence, conflict, and trauma. The networked superstructures they built host data nodes of countless living human memories from every documented period. An infinite database, a sweeping memory palace of all suffering and rapture, peace and conflict, the beautiful and sublime, the ordinary and extraordinary: this is the Doomscroll Archive.
Over time, as the data in the Doomscroll Archive deteriorates and rots, the contexts and meanings of the memories within crumble and fade.
A memory stream glitches within the same scroll – protest, war, the birth of a star, an oil spill, machine gunfire, an advertisement, blue whales singing, another war – A feed, fragmented, contaminating itself.
The technomediated Cyber Performance of purgatory EDIT unfolds from this condition: it invites on-site audience members, as participants, to individually investigate these memories through their emotional, neurological, and cognitive agency. The audience participation reignites the archive’s ability to hold onto its meaning.
How does the installation work?
How does the installation work?