purgatory EDIT

A user-generated montage-based VR experience and cinematic installation. At the core of the project is an archive of moving images representative of histories of violence, a visual semiotic research and analysis process, and an immersive participation-driven Cyber Performance.

 

It invites participants to use a created brain interface to investigate a media archive of conflict and violence through their own emotional, neurological and cognitive agency. Through this engagement, participants facilitate the generating of peer-to-peer prompts, where participants and the digital software-as-artwork create metabolic data as cybernetic feedback loops that circulate and cement human-machine-algorithmic knowledges and biases. Through this interaction, the project highlights long-term and deliberate methods in which digital technologies enforce subliminal visual manipulation, sensory overload, data fatigue, psychological reaction, and ideological numbness.

 

By critiquing the methods of depiction and the existing glorification of violence in popular culture, the metanarratives of purgatory EDIT open the floodgates of abject knowledge(s) and distils the representation of overlooked bodies, data, networks, and ecologies.

 

In times where violence, conflict, and trauma are normalised as everyday happenings, purgatory EDIT performs the task of critical storytelling of historical and current narratives. It responds to a historic and immediate past as it inadvertently shapes a collective future, creating data worlds that mirror and shadow our own – worlds that sing about the dark times – at once prophetic of a world hurtling towards a cataclysmic end yet pregnant with utopian promise; simultaneously transcending borders while witnessing struggles over openness and enclosure, sovereignty and nationalism, citizenship and identity, security and freedom.