Art Cologne Fair – Seventeen Gallery

End-O-Bore operates as a social media feed, a digital deck of Tarot arcana, animated trading cards or all of these at once.

As the distinction between the living and non-living grows increasingly ambiguous, and the boundaries between the body and its multiple artificial extensions become harder to locate, we are entering an era of uncanny permutations. The fact that our physical reality is in constant  dialogue and competition with its virtual counterpart – and now also with a whole new ontological dimension generated by non-human agents – only adds new levels of complexity to our increasingly unstable existence.

The data we consume through our media feeds outperforms what our senses absorb from our diminished lived experience. We have substituted physical interaction for a never-ending influx of images with no hierarchy: holidays, war atrocities, parties, tutorials, political grievances, dick pics and cat videos that relentlessly assail our increasingly numb senses. This paradigm shift demands new folklore and narratives better suited to our era. End-O-Bore aspires to contribute to that mission, depicting a series of meme-myths for a re-coded humanity.

This series of vignettes in a single-channel feed, attempts to map some of our brand-new system’s archetypes, inviting the viewer to a gentle doomscroll through emerging mythologies. The collective unconscious that resided for millennia in a metaphysical cloud has now been privatised and transferred to server farms. The windows into uncanny and yet familiar worlds that this work proposes is a response to the radical redistribution of our shared memories. The old Jungian divisions of persona, shadow, anima and self were conceived when our shared human essence wasn’t accessible online and when words and images needed to be written and drawn.

The emergence of AI as a creative tool and artistic collaborator has open the door to brand new visual grammars, with the potential to outperform traditional filmmaking as the ultimate gesamtkunstwerk. We have entered a post-pop-culture age that has not yet fully defined itself. As 20th-century mass media brought us a whole new pantheon of heroes and gods, it remains to be seen whether the 21st Century is capable of collective storytellings on such grand scale. Perhaps we should expect instead only loose assemblages of continuous micronarratives, like those presented in End-O-Bore’s feed.