DISCO APOCALYPSE [2022]
Immersive Light Installation
Karachi Biennale, PAKISTAN. October-November 2022
A nihilistic frenzy.
An almost unbearable reality.
We invite audiences to rave on the precipice of the abyss.
Welcome to DISCO APOCALYPSE.
A perspective-warping onslaught of over-saturated colour, lighting and sound. Layered visuals coat the disco’s walls and floor. Shafts of moving light and bass-heavy electronic grooves are felt viscerally. Multiple video artworks beam out from screens. People are invited to stay and absorb this hedonistic celebration of end times.
DISCO APOCALYPSE places the artists’ work in the context of a wider society who is in stasis. A society who is unable to take action on climate realities, and who draws on rich environmental and cultural resources for hedonistic pleasure. The DISCO APOCALYPSE is a warning, one that inspires change that’s led by environmental and culturally embedded action.
The disco’s visuals demonstrate processes involving traditional art, science, computational mathematics and graphic-design. The visuals feature First Nations war shields. Shields elicit protective qualities. They’re re-imagined here, by Yorta Yorta Australian artist Lorraine Brigdale, as a tool for the protection of natural ecosystems. Accompanying the shields are enlarged microscope imagery and generative-computational imagery.
DISCO APOCALYPSE was created from audio and visual elements collected and created during the artists’ time in numerous international locations. This immersive art installation features fractured visuals and audio from Amazonia (Brazil), Gamboa (Panama), Batticaloa (Sri Lanka), Karachi (Pakistan), Gili Trawanga (Indonesia) and on Koori lands (Australia). The artists acknowledge the First Peoples and communities of these lands. They came to these landscapes with presence and intention and pay respect to the culture, lives and struggles of these peoples and lands. In making and presenting this artwork, the artists gratefully acknowledge First People’s custodianship and connection to landscape.
PluginHUMAN live and work on the unceded land of the Yaluk-ut Weelam clan who are Boon Wurrung people. They pay respect to ancestors, elders and communities. Lorraine Brigdale is a Yorta Yorta artist who lives and works on the land of the Dja Dja Wurrung and the Taungurung peoples of the Kulin Nation. Always was, always will be, Aboriginal Land.
CREDITS:
Betty Sargeant (she/they): Artist (micrographs, graphic design, video artworks, audio field recordings), creative director, producer
Lorraine Brigdale (she/her): Artist (shields), cultural leader
Justin Dwyer (he/him): Audio composer, lighting designer