Go to The End Website
The End (Death in Seven Colours), 2016
The End: Death in Seven Colours is a non-linear internet artwork made in the interactive authoring environment Korsakow. Seven deaths of historic figures are examined through the prism a vast, encyclopedic mash-up. The work presents an ‘exploded view’ diagram of our culture’s relationship to death and narrative closure. Like a chose-your-own-adventure conspiracy theory, The End weaves together a paranoid meta-text organized around themes of concealment, secrecy, the unknown, and the shifting boundary between animal, man and computer in the post-human era.
The deaths of Alan Turing, Sigmund Freud, Princess Diana, Jim Morrison, Judy Garland, Walter Benjamin, and Marcel Duchamp are the touchstones for many impractical segues and short circuits peppered with recurring motifs such as His Master’s Voice, 4 a.m., Snow White, the Rainbow, Chess, the Man Behind the Curtain, and an array of famous surrealist artworks that find new meaning in their entanglements with these stories.
This is a work of uncanny scholarship as the familiar and unfamiliar rub up against each other, like balloons filled with continental theory and psychoanalysis rubbed against your hair and then placed on a wall where they stay held up by static electricity and magical thinking.