In the video, time has collapsed into a perpetual nonlinear Hollywood trailer. The incessant drone builds to an elusive climax while the original dialogue from the film Strange Days is replaced by exchanges of apocalyptic revelations. Melodramatic and superficial, the subtitles borrow from various prophetic texts and blockbuster films, which in turn foreshadow the Fin de siècle.
Ralph Fiennes (1995) 2014, 9:30 minutes, color, stereo, 16:9, NTSC English/subtitles, single channel video
on turn but to the artificial sensations of the new virtual world. In Ralph Fiennes (1995), VR functions not only as an escape, but as a rapturous resolution for the new millennium, a means to an end for a world always on the brink of collapse.
Fiennes’ ecstatic visions of the digital avatar foretell of the inevitable upgrade and of the growing superiority of VR. Every form of human development has been met with dire consequences for our environment. To produce a world for us, by us, we are to dictate our own rules and disregard the restrictions of the “natural” world. In Ralph Fiennes (1995) production isn’t merely process, but a kind of futurist ideology of convenience. Digital formats allow us to design new environments unbound by the physical world’s ecology, allowing capitalism and commerce to reach their ultimate forms. The hypercapitalist nature of the web and other virtual environments in turn, aids our upgrade into digital beings, allowing us to immigrate from the wasteland of our physical reality to the sterile virtual realm. As Fiennes pushes his virtual product from buyer to buyer, his revelations grow stronger, and the distinction between the real and the virtual become less apparent. His constitution drifts from profound coolness to acute violence, as the schizophrenic narrative progresses through various clips in the film. Interjected by a strobing green screen, their reality is in between production; a neverending state of rendering.