With everything happening in the world right now, the question of how bad things might get has become increasingly urgent.
We’re inching towards a crisis and one of the questions that has been lingering for a while is whether technology will be our saviour or our demise. But technology is only an expression of our humanity.
With the computer as with any tool, the concept and direction must come from the man – this morphs the initial question: Are humans going to kill themselves?
The Doom-Monger is an entity that predicts disaster. When watching the news we’re conditioned to seeing other people because we want to know how they’re dealing with the situations at hand, but the Doom-Monger removes all humans from his vision. With him, the backstage becomes the spectacle. You’re given impressions of a foreseen future that resemble déjà vus; these images refer to events that never happened and never will, even though the spoken word suggests otherwise. He’s showing us the world without present tense.
They are images of our imagined future once the collapse is upon us. Even though a lot of horrible things are happening right this moment, this work is a poetization of the present through the assertion of future asymmetry and asynchronicity.
Doom-Monger is a video installation that uses a state-of-the-art machine-learning framework to remove people from live news broadcasts virtually in real time while leaving the original audio track untouched. It is a never ending livestream. The project was realised in February 2020, shortly before the corona eruption in the western world, and stands as a manifestation of the then prevailing naivety of the people with regard to the seriousness of the crisis.