ABSTRACT
The room is pitch black. When I enter I have to walk like a zombie, a sort of conscious zombie, arms out in front and shuffling along so as not to bump into other people who are probably here as well, even if I can't see them yet. The only illumination is from a large screen on the far wall where still images are being projected. Each image appears on the screen for about a minute before fading into the next one. The colours are washed out or saturated in ways that seem old-fashioned-familiar, the modern taking on already a patina of antiquity, which goes along with the unconvincingly ‘up to date’ aspirations of the images themselves. I presume I've come in towards the end of the hundred-minute sequence. The topic at the moment appears to be transport. A silver-coloured train has been photographed from overhead. White arrows pasted onto the image mark out the length of one of the carriages in units of ‘m’. Metres probably. This is followed by an image of a passenger airplane on the ground. And then another airplane – the same or similar – suspended among clouds and blue sky. That's fantastic. The airliner is followed by a picture of people on bicycles – on solid ground again – but again going somewhere: cheerfully cycling past a clutch of enormous satellite receiver dishes. A polar expedition negotiates a crevasse. A book is open at a page with a diagram of our solar system. I assume it's our solar system. An astronaut, at the end of a curling umbilicus, floats in deep space. A space rocket is blasting off. Wild geese are in flight over a darkening landscape. A string quartet is captured scraping and plucking silently. A violin is pictured next to a page of sheet music. And then a black circle appears upon a white background, which is when I imagine that we are either at the end of the world or back at the start of the image sequence.
