About

purgatory EDIT is a user-generated montage-based VR experience and cinematic installation. By critiquing the methods of depiction and the existing glorification of violence in popular culture, its metanarratives open the floodgates of abject knowledge(s) and distil the representation of overlooked bodies, data, networks, and ecologies.

In the film, Dr Brodsky of the Ludovico medical facility forces Alex to watch violent images for extended periods of time as his eyes are held open with specula. He is pumped with nausea-, paralysis- and fear-inducing drugs at the same time, with the objective being the development of a nauseous association when experiencing or thinking about violence, causing an aversion.

The Ludovico technique is the project's point of departure — not as a method to reproduce, but as a question about what sustained exposure to depicted violence does to the person watching, and who decides that it should.

The Doomscroll Archive currently holds more than 30,000 published clips, excerpted from around 800 source files — close to 2,000 hours of video. The archive proliferates quickly enough that any precise description of its current state is provisional.

Material is drawn from documented recordings of actual events, or of events based on actual events. The archive is public.

The research strand has three parts:

1. Creating a Violence Intensity Map.
2. Categorising the types of violence represented in the archive.
3. Collaborating with neuroscientists and cognitive behaviour analysts.

Each is a way of making explicit a judgement that is otherwise made silently — by an editor, by a platform, or by an algorithm.

The installation occupies three spaces.

Primary space — the participant, the brain interface, and the montage they generate. Secondary space — the audience, watching both the montage and the participant. Tertiary space — the archive itself, browsable, public, and indifferent to whether anyone is performing.