Sofia-based media artist Petko Dourmana recently exhibited the Post Global Warming Survival Kit at SIGGRAPH 2009. Dourmana’s work appeared as part of the BioLogic juried art show, a venue for exploring the connections between human perceptions of technology and nature and the ways in which we intermediate our experiences with our environment.
Dourmana’s installation includes a small “working place” that casts viewers as observers on a beach affected by nuclear winter. In the artist’s vision, human senses have evolved to face the dead, dark landscape. Survivors have developed the ability to see infrared light, gradually losing their sight of light from the visible part of the spectrum. To simulate this, the exhibit uses a three-channel video system to project images of the North Sea coast that can only be seen with night vision goggles. The interior of the cubicle includes “different analog devices and utility objects” needed for futuristic workers to complete tasks.
Dourmana’s blending of different generations of apocalyptic angst gives the project a strangely appealing depth. In Dourmana’s eschatology, political leaders have decided to fight global warming by intentionally detonating enough nuclear weapons to obscure the atmosphere. The ashy, fallout-laden, clouds call to mind the fears of the Cold War, expressed in everything from On the Beach to Dr. Strangelove. The root crisis–global warming–mirrors more contemporary fears. The hellish seaside setting hearkens back to the last images of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine.
The setting also offers a twist on standard pop culture visions of the apocalpyse. Over the last few generations, people have imagined survivors huddled deep underground in fallout shelters or abandoned subway systems, created violent worlds in which gangs clash over dwindling supplies of fuel, or even placed the remnant of human civilization in neo-medieval monasteries. The Post Global Warming Survival Kit gives a gentle nod to existentialist and absurdist explorations of the end of all things, such as Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit and Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. Civilization as we know it has ended, human evolution has taken another step–but you still need to show up at the office and plod away in a little cubicle.