ABOUT

purgatory EDIT is 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.

purgatory EDIT is a significant marker in generating a unique research collaboration across the domains of (Contemporary) Art and (Neuro) Science. It is a gesamtkunstwerk on the intersections of Art and Science, specifically holding Peace and Conflict Studies, Archival Practices, Contemporary Art, Artistic Research, Curatorial Studies, Neuroscience, Cognitive Behaviour and Systems Theory at its core.

It extends a praxes immersed in thinking about Systems: how they function in everyday settings, and how they can be transformed for a diverse, equitable, and inclusive society. By using ‘System Art’ and ‘Generative Art’ practises, it becomes possible to investigate how art and visual culture interact with other systems and conditions, for example, global socio-politics, violence, and histories of oppression.

INSPIRATION

The Ludovico Technique is a fictional negative-aversion technique depicted in A Clockwork Orange (1971, dir. Stanley Kubrick):

“In the film, Dr Brodsky (Carl Duering) of the Ludovico medical facility forces Alex (Malcolm McDowell) 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.”

In this vision of a once-future present, the Ludovico technique goes beyond simply being a negative aversion technology. Instead, it is perhaps significant as a prophecy intended for our present time: in which ‘bodies, data, and networks’ become sites of consumption where attention is a resource, a scarce consumer commodity, and a limiting factor in consumption. Consumers are convinced, coerced, compelled, manipulated and directed to purchase, whether digital content, social values, political ideology, economic produce, or cultural experience. Thus, in the social economic or political spheres the majoritarian view, the ‘Eyeball Economy’, the consensus, forms the mantra of neoliberal capitalist reality.

purgatory EDIT alludes to the tendencies and trajectories that are shaping the world, where ongoing instances of wars, conflicts, insurgencies, genocide-level pogroms, riots, bombings, State & extra-state operations have diversified the terminology of aggressive friction and violence. Beyond traditional warfare, persisting structural modes of conflict perpetuate alienation based on fictions of race, gender, ethnic and societal hierarchies. Platform technologies and online interfaces create information overload and increasingly grow opaque, serving the interests of Surveillance Empires to exploit data to reshape political world orders based on disenfranchisement and contemporary borderization. They create necropolitical, ethno-fascist governments that transform countries into incarceration camps, penal colonies, detention facilities and refugee centres, designed to confine and contain undesirable bodies. It escalates techno-legal architectures of control where well-being and welfare for citizens and ecology are prescriptively replaced by security and risk management; and promotes ‘legalised policing’ of ‘direct, structural, and cultural violence’ where ecocide, genocide and conflicts are simply becoming tools for neo-liberal capitalism to recycle pain.

On an individual level, anyone using any form of technology today is plugged into this System. Yet in a hyper-digitised world, where forms of violence remain invisible or unrecognised, we (who are not the same) are trapped within our own filter bubbles generated by algorithmic bias. Blind to its Network Effects we simultaneously self-regulate, reproduce, and censor our engagement and relationship with the world. Such violence leads to long-term trauma, helplessness and precarity, causing significant ruptures in the collective social fabric.

Recognising and narrating such experiences becomes difficult unless we find ways to move laterally across disciplines, interests and communities, and understand how violence is defined and applied across micro (interpersonal), meso (institutional), and macro (trans-societal) scales. For these processes to be known, they must be explored, visualised, satirised and challenged.

As a speculative installation, purgatory EDIT mimics the Ludovico Technique (although without pumping participants with nausea-, paralysis- and fear-inducing drugs) that parallels the dystopian narrative of A Clockwork Orange, to scrutinise and examine:

the boundaries between addiction and aversion, enforcement and neglect, proclivity and phobia
the value of worldviews concocted through prosaic binaries such as ‘Good and Evil’, ‘War and Peace’, ‘Violence and Pacifism’
the validity of such meta-concepts in the hyper-nuanced complexities of our world today.

The experimental cinematic experience of purgatory EDIT is further based on three significant philosophical conceptualizations of cinematic and dramaturgical theories of the 20th century:

Eisenstein’s Montage Theory asserts that a series of connected images allows for complex ideas to be extracted from a sequence and, when strung together, constitute the entirety of a film's ideological and intellectual power.
The Yugoslavian Black Wave Cinema movement, “standing for the subordination of form to the psychological contents of human ethical and metaphysical drama today”; and
Antoin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty contends that rather than comfort, the role of the artist must be to “assault the senses of the audience”.

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. By bringing together local and geographically distant perspectives on constructing historical narratives that shape our socio-political landscape, it encourages its audience to revise and reconsider what stories we tell and how we share them. It casts the audience, not as a passive spectator, but as a critical witness – not to the macro tides of history, but to the fate of those invisibilised and marginalised within these histories of power relations, where one’s humanism can be located in their siding with the systematically oppressed.

THE DOOMSCROLL ARCHIVE

At the core of the project is the ‘Doomscroll Archive’. Developed by the purgatory EDIT team, it is sourced using archival war footage, movie and documentary clips, advertisements, newsreels, landscape panoramas, home videos, and personal archives of its contributors.

This open-source, publicly accessible, searchable moving image archive comprises 30,000+ clips that collectively are a testament to the hegemonic representations and the glorification of violence within visual and cinematic vocabularies. It examines narratives from zones of conflict, hegemonic power structures and geopolitics of dominance to question what it means to be (post)human in a new digital regime marked by the erosion of living matter, conversion of life into big data, rising ethnofascism and disintegrating democracies, asking:

How can artistic imagination affect the politics of power, violence and justice? How are sensory perceptions of peace and violence reconfigured when our lifeworlds are highly encrypted, and nuanced engagements give way to simplified declaratives driven by the attention economy? How can we hope to have new sympathetic encounters of equals? How can we replace the Internet of Things (IoT) with an Internet of Accountability – as a decolonial praxis? What does accountability mean when we are trapped within our own filter bubbles generated by algorithmic bias and an increasing digital divide? What role may poetry have in a world space generated by code?

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

Fully access the Doomscroll Archive and the Experience Log as a guest, or log in to create, modify and share your unique editable playlists, and preview playlists made by others.

Become a listed contributor by sharing your media representing any kind of Direct, Structural, or Invisiblised forms of violence with us. Contact us to contribute to the archive.

ANALYSIS RESEARCH

This archive serves as source material to conduct a ‘conceptual visual vocabulary analysis’ and study keywords like ‘war’, ‘peace’, ‘violence’, and ‘conflict’ through the intersectional lens of violence and conflict resolution, neocolonialism, data hegemony and power relations.

Such a study is essential to reveal how such concepts are used and represented within moving image media such as documentary, video, and cinema.

We performed a visual semiotic analysis by creating an Intensity Map – a relational map of the archive that explores the complex relationships between peace and conflict.

Creating a Violence Intensity Map

By correlating the visual material contents with a cascading intensity value, we categorised and sorted the archive contents across 20 ‘data banks’, ranging from Peace 6 to War 14. This initial categorisation was done using multiple referential templates derived from multiple studies by Norwegian Peace and Conflict Studies pioneer Johan Galtung.

For example, according to one study, categorisation was made possible by elaborating on Galtung’s proposed violence categorisation where violence can be broadly categorised as Direct (tangible, often physically identifiable); Structural (institutional and occluded in systemic behavioural patterns); and Cultural (forms that are normalised to the point of becoming invisible and indivisible from normal practices and patterns of being).

It is then possible to further categorise types of violence within this model, for example, as contexts, meaning: Self-directed (including superficial to severe self-abuse and suicidal behaviour), Interpersonal (including intimate partner, family, or community-based violence), or Collective violence (including social, political and ecological); as well as in terms of forms, such as (1) Physical, (2) Sexual, (3) Emotional, (4) Psychological, (5) Spiritual, (6) Cultural, (7) Economic / Financial Abuse, (8) Verbal Abuse, (9) Neglect, and (10) Cyber/ Information Violence.

Simultaneously, by deconstructing Galtung’s definition of violence as a ‘negation of needs’, whether Survival needs, Identity needs, Well-being needs, Freedom needs, and Ecological needs, it becomes possible to expand violence as a ‘fundamental disintegration’.

Categorise the types of violence represented in this archive

These different categorizations of violence illustrate how the defining frameworks, each with recurrent iterations and exponential overlaps, form complex networks that are not easily unravelable or simplifiable into a singular narrative or cohesive whole. This difficulty stems from the subjectivities of experience across multiple identities, emplaced upon layers of knowledge(s) both situated and fortified as institutional, creating a kaleidoscopic metascape of vertically evaluated information overload, or what Achille Mbembe describes as ‘Planetary Entanglement’.

To represent this within the categorisation process, we created a Categorization Index comprising multiple semiotic markers scored according to the violence typologies. These markers, mapped in a visual graph, aid in the visual identification of violence and peace and the subsequent placement of the archive clips in the 20 data banks created for the installation.

Collaborate with Neuroscientists and Cognitive Behaviour analysts

Our ongoing research has been to study the impact of visuals on neural, phenomenological and behavioural representations, and whether such a study can promote conflict reduction. The core research question for purgatory EDIT is to generate a deep understanding of whether images of violence generate empathy or numbness in the viewers.

For this, we are seeking collaborations with neuroscientists and Cognitive Behaviour specialists whose work finds alignment with our own. Together we hope to build a convivial environment for generating academically valid research.

CYBER PERFORMANCE

Using this archive as the foundational data bank of pre-curated individual ‘scenes’, purgatory EDIT invites its audience to access cinematic experiences through innovative modes of playfulness and care by casting the participant as a critical spectator and witness.

No longer passive viewers, participants undergo an immersive voyage through historical events and speculative futures. Through confrontational engagements contained within the experience that challenge underlying motives, furtive histories of violence embedded in our modes of representation, how they are reproduced over time, and how this structurally shapes the stories we tell.

As a participatory installation and a technomediated cyber performance, purgatory EDIT foregrounds the use and potential of experimental cutting-edge technologies such as an EEG-based brainware (Emotiv Epoc X), a bioinformatics & brain interface software developed by the purgatory EDIT team, Virtual Reality (VR) headsets, and virtual cinema. Using these, participants’ brainwaves can control a real-time juxtaposition of a pre-compiled and curated string of videos – its sequencing, intensities and specific types of video, as well as playback speed, fluctuations, and designed glitches – enabling an experience of agency, one that signals the use of choice and willpower to simulate the world we want to create.

The installation as a technomediated cyber performance generates a sequence of videos in ongoing, ever-changing permutations, thereby creating a seamless, non-looping, unending, and unique cinematic experience – every time it is accessed.

We invite you to investigate this archive through your own emotional, neurological, and cognitive agency, and create a generative sequence of clips from the curated media archive. To participate, simply follow these simple steps:

Login to create your user ID, and click Sign up to book your time-slot for the participatory performance;
Carefully read and sign the Consent Form, and Trigger Warning documents for participation;
Reach the venue at the appointed time and enjoy the performance.

Your unique protected user ID will enable your permanent access to your Playlists, and the Experience Log containing recording(s) of your experience and the EEG-based data output generated.*

*Please note: EEG-based data output is available to you only if you have consented to the recording and storage of this data in the Consent Form.

INSTALLATION

The installation is imagined as a combination of configurations of physical and online spaces:

Primary Space

A Virtual Reality (VR) driven Cyber Performance where a single audience member is invited at a time to sit in the chair and participate. The performance is conducted through a ‘brainware’, a controller that reads the participant’s brain activity to create a real-time sequence of pre-compiled and curated videos in ongoing, ever-changing permutations, generating a seamless, non-looping, unending, and unique cinematic experience.

The VR headset and noise-cancelling headphones facilitate an immersive solitary experience free from background ‘noise’. As the participant experiences the ‘live stream’ feed through VR headsets, a curved LED screen streams this cinematic performance for non-participating audiences in the space.

Secondary Space

A site-scalable data wall-styled multi-channel projection of the video archive – comprising film, documentary, advertisements, news clips, historical war footage, landscape panoramas and home videos – that are representational of violence in categorically different forms.

Tertiary Space

purgatory EDIT database of compiled video footage is housed online as a website titled the Doomscroll Archive, presented on a smart device (iPad or similar) as part of the exhibition.

Additionally, an exhibition may contain a first-edition suite of cyanotype prints on archival Hahnemuhle paper as an excerpt of the archived material; as well as a suite of digitally composited stills rendered as prints and/or paintings.

TEAM

This work continues artistic practices that are immersed in thinking about Systems: how they function in everyday settings, and how they can be transformed for the creation of diverse, equitable, and inclusive societies.

By using ‘System Art’ and ‘Generative Art’ practises, the project team investigates how art and visual culture interact with other systems and conditions, for example, global socio-politics, violence, and histories of oppression.

Ali Akbar Mehta | Artist, Researcher & Archivist
Jernej Čuček Gerbec | VDMX programming & Software developer
Palash Mukhopadhyay | UX & Digital Product Design
Adnan Mirza | UNITY and Virtual Cinema Design
Pruthu Parab | Sound design and additional score
Anoushkaa Bhatnagar | Arts Manager and Producer
Sanyam Varun | Archive manager & Research assistant
Aditya Rokade | Post production and processing (Video)
Koshy Brahmatmaj | Costume Design
Yuki Elias | Intro Voice Over
Anjni Gupta | Social Media template design
Vishnu Patel | Costume Production
Stitch Audio | Sound Recording

Institutional collaborators

Department of Animation, Whistling Woods International, Mumbai, IN
Department of Interactive Game Design, Whistling Woods International, Mumbai, IN
Department of Contemporary Art, Aalto University, Helsinki, FI

Grants and support

The Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike), FI
The Kone Foundation, FI
European Media Art Platform
Werklietz, Halle, DE
Transmediale Studio, Berlin, DE