
In Stanley Kubrick's 1971 adaptation of Anthony Burgess' dystopian science fiction novel 'A Clockwork Orange', the protagonist Alex (Malcolm McDowell) is chosen to undergo an experimental program called the Ludovico Technique — a brutal form of aversion therapy that includes Alex watching violent films of Nazi atrocities for extended periods of time while his eyes are held open with specula. He is pumped full of nausea, paralysis, and fear-inducing drugs at the same time, with the idea being that the association of a nauseous feeling with violence would cause him to become physically sick if he even thinks about committing a violent crime.
purgatory EDIT: Liberation Archives for the Cyborgs of Now — a collaborative user-generated montage-based cinematic VR experience and multimedia installation conceptualised by Ali Akbar Mehta — is inspired by this fictional aversion technique from 'A Clockwork Orange'. Drawing from Eisenstein’s Montage Theory, Yugoslav Black Wave Cinema of the 60s, and Antoin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty which contends that the role of the artist must be to “assault the senses of the audience”, the project alludes to the contemporary tendencies and trajectories that are shaping our world, where ongoing instances of wars, conflicts, insurgencies, genocide-level pogroms, riots, bombings, and state and extra-state operations have diversified the terminologies of violence, peace, and justice.
At the core of the project is the ‘Doomscroll Archive’. Developed by the purgatory EDIT team, the archive is sourced using archival war footage, feature film and documentary clips, advertisements, newsreels, landscape panoramas, home videos, and personal archives of individual contributors. It features a cinematic VR experience that uses the Doomscroll Archive to examine violence in its myriad of forms.
This open-source, publicly accessible, searchable moving image archive comprises of more than 30,000 clips that form a collective testament to the hegemonic representations and the glorification of violence within historic and contemporary visual and cinematic vocabularies. It examines narratives from zones of conflict, hegemonic power structures and geopolitics of dominance to question what it means to be human — as well as (post)human — in a new digital regime marked by the erosion of life, conversion of life into big data, rising ethnofascism and disintegrating democracies.
In this day and age when violence, conflict, and trauma are normalised as everyday occurrences and we are desensitised and ideologically numbed to such injustice by an unending algorithmic onslaught of violent imagery, purgatory EDIT performs the task of critically retelling our historical and current narratives.
By bringing together local and geographically distant perspectives on constructing historical narratives of conflict that shape our socio-political landscape, it encourages us to reconsider the stories we tell and how we share them. purgatory EDIT casts the audience, not as a passive spectator, but as a critical witness — not to the macro tides of history, but to the fate of the invisibilised and marginalised peoples within these histories of power, where one’s humanity depends on aligning with the systematically oppressed.
purgatory EDIT: Liberation Archives for the Cyborgs of Now premiers at Transmediale Studio from January 9 till February 2, 2025. The installation is part of the group exhibition UnNatural Encounters, on view at the silent green Kulturquartier from January 9 to 19, 2025; and the Transmediale Festival 2025, '(near) near but – far', taking place from January 30 to February 2, 2025.
purgatory EDIT has been created in collaboration with Jernej Čuček Gerbec, Palash Mukhopadhyay, Adnan Mirza, Pruthu Parab, Anoushkaa Bhatnagar, Sanyam Varun, Aditya Rokade, Koshy Brahmatmaj, Anjni Gupta, and Yuki Elias.