In Perpetuity, Eternally, Forever!
In Perpetuity, Eternally, Forever! is a site-specific installation commissioned for the 10th Bi-City Biennale of UrbanismArchitecture (UABB), Shenzhen and Hong Kong. The work operates within a parallel universe loosely modelled on our own, in which advances in medicine have overcome human frailty and the lifespan extends indefinitely. In this world, death is not an event but a regulated service. The Afterlife Corporation holds sole administrative rights over the spiritual transitory system to the Afterlife®, accessible only through authorised channels.
The installation's central object is the Death Chamber 5000, the corporation's flagship product: an antiquated phone booth tucked discreetly into the urban fabric of the biennale site, offering what its patent-pending literature describes as a zero-waste system of dimensional transit. Reactivating the residual colonial form of the phone booth as customer-facing apparatus, the work positions technology as the administrative interface for the metaphysical. Some choose to seek transit through illicit channels, believing an unofficial crossing might deliver them to a different dimensional destination entirely. The booth is out of order.
Inside plays a looping film composed of repurposed Hong Kong commercial footage from the 1980s and 90s. Real estate advertisements, credit card promotions, life insurance, luxury travel, massage chairs: the material of a specific era's aspiration, recut and narrated through an original voiceover to communicate the idealistic state of the world the corporation wants its citizens to inhabit. The aspirational visual languages of late twentieth century Hong Kong are taken further than the era intended. The object is from the future. The images are from the past.
Suspended between an object inherited from a past that no longer belongs to anyone and a future in which death has been rendered optional, the work stages the promise of a single-player respawn between levels.