Catastrophe Jangled Hideously Out of Process
Catastrophe Jangled Hideously Out of Process consists of images of disaster generated from machine learning algorithms. It is a project that probes into how we produce and consume images, what kind of visual material excites us and our relationship with the image as a representation of the world.
The images are trained from hundreds of images of post disaster scenarios from the recent years – tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, landslides, plane crashes, wildfires and war. The saturation of news media with such imagery has lead to a certain desensitization, while simultaneously our fetishism for them makes us desire more, our gaze becoming trapped on this reality made strange. The commonplace become transformed into the transcendentally horrific. The competitive need to grab our attention forces media to lead with ever more grisly material, the images that make us stop in our tracks. The barrage of grisly and violent images eventually results in the psychological phenomena known as the “collapse of compassion” and “compassion fatigue”. A loss of emotional connection can coincide with a desire to see more of the same kind of imagery. The contemporary media methodology is to distort, break down into parts and pull apart disaster scenarios in order to eke out something sensational from it. And this is how we end up fetishising disaster and tragedy. The content is often distributed rapidly through social media and becomes viral, pervading our everyday imaginations and conversations. While making us feel safe by comparison, a simultaneous sensation of guilt appears as we observe the vast difference between our privilege and someone else’s misfortune. The more we witness suffering, the more we are aware that we are not suffering.
However, there is also beauty in these pictures. Apart from our seduction by the horrific, there are abstract tones and forms and qualities in the aesthetic of destruction that are painterly, cinematic and beautiful. Our unease is piqued by the knowledge that our aesthetic satisfaction comes at the cost of great human suffering. So, how could we appease these compulsions of ours 'ethically'? How can we satisfy our enjoyment of the aesthetic of disaster without having to take into account the human cost? Is there a way to separate the aesthetics from the humanity? By generating images of disaster from which the sensationalism has been removed at the point of origin we arrive at a satisfying moment of guilt free aesthetic.
The project fits within the arc of The Haunting Series, expressing and representing the presence of existential threats. Catastrophe Jangled Hideously Out of Process adds an extra twist to this narrative, with both its title and its content generated by forms of artificial intelligence - which is in itself considered one of the existential threats that we face.
The work is currently exhibited as large scale light boxes arranged as triptych
