Final Destination

A still image of a man running towards the sea. Very slowly, it becomes more and more pixellated, culminating in the illusion that the man has disappeared into the water.
The work is a personal reflection on the estranged self, a meditation on the feelings of alienation that can overwhelm daily life, and make one begin to lose his sense of identity as his inner being gradually deconstructs itself.
The image is borrowed from an Egyptian film made during the 1980s, an evocation of the artist’s longing for cultural nostalgia. In essence, the figure portrayed can be seen as the artist himself, giving his back to his home and audience, dissolving through the sea of pixels until he is no more. This poetic use of the digital video medium challenges the usual impression associated with it as being cold and devoid of human touch, something not imbued with the sentimentality of film reels, for instance. But the original image is actually an analog one, transferred onto digital VCD, and then manually processed to create the scene of destruction. Perhaps this unconventional method also means to comment on the loss of nostalgia for the physicality of media, as all media is now destined to coalesce under one roof: the digital pixellated experience.


Exhibition views - Akademie der Künste der Welt - photos by Alfred Jansen