Mitra Tabrizian, 'Beyond the Limits'
Prophesying catastrophe is incredibly banal. The more original move is to assume that it has already occurred.
Jean Baudrillard
Set in the future, fragments of every day life are constructed, each portraying an event in which something has gone 'wrong'! These can be interpreted as: an unfortunate incident (the man 'jumping' from the building) - the unpredictability of tecnology (the clones killing their father - or the sheep growing unnaturally large) or in a more philosophical sense, these 'mishappenings' can be seen as an allegory; a reference to Jean Baudrillard's point that we are moving towards a world where the basic axioms of each system are pushed to the point where they begin to turn upon themselves, to produce the opposite effects from those intended.
A man is falling. Is it suicide or murder? Or within all powerful global technostructure, the distinction between the two has now become blurred. A metaphorical murder then; having to 'function' within the world of uncertainty, where the logic is maximising profit at any cost - technology dictates - & concepts such as 'over-worked', 'security', 'communication' or 'future' have no meanings.
The clones are emerging where this time technology attempts to control the unpredictability of 'nature', to conceive perfect children, to suppress difference - but as the image predicts here the children may after all turn out not that 'perfect', even if we learn to live with the same face everywhere!
Nature aims at perfection. The man is preoccupied with the work, the woman with the man. No communication between the two, in the age of communication. The sun shining in the foreground - a dramatic sky in the background - the flowers, lush - the apples, shiny - the sheep, 'natural'. Everything seems in its place, except for a sheep in the distance which seems out of proportion, out of control! A sign of imperfection in this flawless version of reality? A reminder that this in fact is an artificial landscape? Or, to follow Baudrillard's more subtle observation, these signs of imperfections are our 'signatures' in the simulated world.
So moments in the future; each unfolding a mise-en-scene of 'disaster', in which things have been pushed to the limit. But perhaps it is beyond the limit, where collapse is inevitable that we begin to see the working of the 'progress' in its entirety.
