Brandon Tay
Duration: 4m
The animated images of Death Spiral picture the implosion of our visions of the future, a mash-up of pop cultural citations and textual references that imagines the eventual entropy of the collapse of the cosmos. Lurking behind the virtual panorama are texts such as William Gibson’s short story, “The Gernsback Continuum”, and Nick Land’s study of time travel, Templexity: Disordered Loops through Shanghai Times, and embedded in its kaleidoscopic pageantry are motifs drawn from televisual sources, ranging from Star Trek to the Gundam franchise to Neon Genesis Evangelion. Our constant consumption of visual media, as well as the various calamities that have transpired in recent decades, such as Y2K, 9/11, SARS and the current COVID-19 crisis, have led to a certain loss of definition regarding our ideas of futurity, according to the artist. It has fed into a temporal fluidity where notions of past, present and future - including fears and speculations of a future armageddon - are increasingly morphing into an asynchronous slipstream. That temporal flux is personified, here, in the figure of a three-headed anime female, who suggests triplicate or tri-headed deities in various ancient mythological systems, such as the Hellenistic Hecate or the Hindu Trimurti.