Darkness was here yesterday (after Conrad)
2015
Video 5:30 min (looped)
Darkness was here yesterday (after Conrad) explores the mapping of our brain as the final frontier. The film mixes found footage of skull fMRI with my own imagery, creating a parallel narrative and a new soundscape. The starting point is Heart of Darkness and subsequently Apocalypse Now, which is loosely based on it. I use various oils to cover a glass surface, and document the emerging light patterns from a projection of Apocalypse Now through the glass. I am interested in how narrative changes through interpretation- in this case my interpretation on notions of mapping in various forms.
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness shows us “The horror” of colonialism- a time where mapping was a key tool of dominion. The juxtaposition of these abstracted images of violence together with imagery of blood-flow patterns from fMRIs offers a new reading on modern forms of mapping- representing the old and the new paradigms of dominance and discovery. Our current obsession is to look further inwards, to place a flag on the human brain. A growing obsession to dissect our bodies might identify diseases before they spread, but what happens when every aspect of our lives and bodies is documented and catalogued? As the brain race is in full swing we have to ask ourselves who stands to gain? If data rendered transparent and visible can be better consumed and analyzed, then a transparent body is one that becomes a mapped territory primed for profit extraction.
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