Medeology Collective
'The Four Unicorns of the Apocalypse'
1/17 'The Four Unicorns of the Apocalypse', Opening Live Media Performance and Installation for Pulse: Art & Technology Conference, Savannah, USA
Medeology Collective
‘The Four Unicorns of the Apocalypse’ meditates on some of the major aspects of spectacle culture and the theme of apocalyptic ‘end times’ in a digitally re-mediated society. The basis of the work are four suspended inflatable pool furniture ‘Pagasus-Unicorns’ that act as sculptural screens for 3D projection mapped video imagery. The
live audio-visual performance elaborates on the current dystopian zeitgeist in the West as cultural and political crises increases while media systems spectacularize and feed the consumption of memes of mass distraction and pacification. This is a media stream of bizarre messages that mediate an even stranger reality.
In this age of mythic meme proliferation, where media delivery systems have blended into an incoherent and mercurial river of entertainment, information and opinion. One cannot distinguish one form from another, thus confusion becomes the normal state of society:
war is entertainment, cartoons are pornography, rumors are truth, truth is crime, injustice
is laziness and belligerence is strength. Nothing arrives in its expected package.
‘The Four Unicorns of the Apocalypse’ delivers a stream of contradictory information, packaged in the clothing of Biblical prophecy, and reified as recreational pool-toys, or sculptural media-spectacle.
It is our intention that the viewer is seduced by the pop-cultural cuteness of the soft, comically harmless visage of four large pool-toy ‘Unicorn-Pegasuses’ flying above. With Pegasus wings and unicorn horns, they loom above the audience in a scenario of comic doom. The imagery projected onto the Unicorn-Pegasi is different for each one. As well
as ‘death’, ‘pestilence’, ‘war’ and ‘famine’, they are each assigned an aspect of culture and media reflecting the current state of affairs in the world. The shocking and serious will mix with the humorous and irrelevant, and act as a meta-chameleon sculptural skin. What are the new signs of the Apocalypse in our modern society?
The Collective aimed to express the contradictions inherent in our current system, whether this is the message or the delivery method: the medium is a chimera composed of chimeras.
live audio-visual performance elaborates on the current dystopian zeitgeist in the West as cultural and political crises increases while media systems spectacularize and feed the consumption of memes of mass distraction and pacification. This is a media stream of bizarre messages that mediate an even stranger reality.
In this age of mythic meme proliferation, where media delivery systems have blended into an incoherent and mercurial river of entertainment, information and opinion. One cannot distinguish one form from another, thus confusion becomes the normal state of society:
war is entertainment, cartoons are pornography, rumors are truth, truth is crime, injustice
is laziness and belligerence is strength. Nothing arrives in its expected package.
‘The Four Unicorns of the Apocalypse’ delivers a stream of contradictory information, packaged in the clothing of Biblical prophecy, and reified as recreational pool-toys, or sculptural media-spectacle.
It is our intention that the viewer is seduced by the pop-cultural cuteness of the soft, comically harmless visage of four large pool-toy ‘Unicorn-Pegasuses’ flying above. With Pegasus wings and unicorn horns, they loom above the audience in a scenario of comic doom. The imagery projected onto the Unicorn-Pegasi is different for each one. As well
as ‘death’, ‘pestilence’, ‘war’ and ‘famine’, they are each assigned an aspect of culture and media reflecting the current state of affairs in the world. The shocking and serious will mix with the humorous and irrelevant, and act as a meta-chameleon sculptural skin. What are the new signs of the Apocalypse in our modern society?
The Collective aimed to express the contradictions inherent in our current system, whether this is the message or the delivery method: the medium is a chimera composed of chimeras.
3D render of pre-visualization pics of the work.
