The Empire of Never
This series is a natural reaction of the body to the changes happening in Russia. My homeland is a corporation controlled by shareholders, selected based on their bloodlines and talent for sycophancy. My homeland is poverty of hope amid an abundance of technology. Silence, steeped in fear. We are mired in a cyberpunk dystopia.
The war traps people in a virtual space of bad news and delusional propaganda. Not everyone has the opportunity to leave, and not everyone is willing to risk their lives – or the lives of their loved ones – to bring about change. Self-preservation is a fundamental evolutionary mechanism. The illusion of free will, in its absence, slowly gnaws holes in the cemetery soil, statistics, and human hearts. If you once hoped to live long enough to see immortality become a medical option, now you fear that others—those who should have been gone long ago—might also live too long.
Even time here loses its continuity, dissolving into a formless, viscous loop of waiting: for the end of the regime, the war, life—something. The illusion of free will is a defining feature of computer games: a limited choice within a scripted narrative. Non-player characters, passing cars, the wind—everything moves along its own animation cycle, maintaining only the appearance of life. Cyclical time without the possibility of choosing actions is the absence of time at all. Nothing in the game can truly die, and as long as humanity exists, the game itself—like any digital product—can persist indefinitely.
This series is an act of violence born from mercy. Using an instant thermal print kid camera, I extract people, walls, light, and trees from their digital hell and transfer them into physical reality. The thermal printing process allows me to preserve the discrete nature of digital objects – and their main function – to be an image, to depict – reformatting the binary code, zeros and ones, into their physical analogue – black and white.
Printing the image activates time. And time, in turn, brings death. Due to the chemical properties of the thermal paper, the image begins to fade immediately after printing, with the speed of decay depending on external factors such as temperature and direct sunlight.
By triggering time, I trigger death.
And I finally let them die.
For Johnny
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