Sin City 00:00:00:00 is a video installation work created in parallel with the technological media Non-Human Theatre Sin City. The installation consists of a 2-channel synchronous video projection and three hand constructed models. The main setting in the video images is a large commercial space characterized by an unrealistic theatrical atmosphere where the action unfolds. A chase ensues for four characters (a female retail worker, a police officer, a young girl, and the manager of an international corporation) whose paths cross in the non-linear countdown of the final 24 hours till doomsday. They portray the flux of desire and ambiguity in the digital information age and in a capitalist world, and confront the realities of existence in an endless rheology of characters, objects, information, and civilization for the contemporary man.

As an extension of the scenes from the video images, the modeled objects provide another type of sensory mode in the rheological relationship. If the video images present a multitude of possibilities and extensions in the relationship between objects and characters, the model corresponds by creating a conversation loop between the sites and images in its materiality and man-made quality. “The marketplace”, “the cliff”, and “the sea” each represent scenes from life, death and an infinite universal ennui that we all experience. Like the imagery of the obelisk in the film, these are both an ancient symbol of science and civilization, and the embodiment of massive quantities of information. They float disoriented in the universe, highlighting the contradictions and confusion between civilization and chaos. They become metaphors for the end of human history, the transport of the profusion of information, and the confusion between unknown quadrants.

The misplaced time axis presented by the countdown numerals which recur in Sin City 00:00:00:00 dismantles the present and the future as conceptualized in linear time. The significance of a steady march toward zero does not end with the advent of doomsday or death, but rather continues in the overlapping of time, and a return from a disorienting drift in the universe. This return is a re-observation and re-imagination of the present situation. Explorations of the future are necessarily a renewed discovery and extraction of the contemporary. Sin City 00:00:00:00 is an attempt at extrapolation, a temporal topology constructed by objects and images. We question the meaning of human civilization and what it may lead to, and what possible imagined futures still exist for all of us.

*image (left)
courtesy of the artist