Dear Miami 8:02

Trevor Van den Eijnden
Laser-cut paper, wood, glue, iPhone 5
Slow motion video
3:07 perpetual loop
2015

A high frame rate recording of a burning carousel horse slowed slowed-down, and lopped in both forward and backward motion, Dear Miami 8:02 is both a reference to Roísín Murphy’s song Dear Mimai, which it samples, and visual a metaphor for being stuck in time. The work is a reference of—and inspired by—H. G. Well’s original early 20th century concept of an atomic bomb. He believed that it would be a weapon that would explode forever, thus rendering any landscape it touched as inhospitable for eternity. It was this concept that inspired the Manhattan Project and the eventual development of the atomic bomb that we know today.  This work is a bleak, but garish suggestion that we are forever trapped on this carousel and that what we as a species has done to this Earth cannot be undone. It is a pop-culture inspired vulgarity in yellow and puce.

(Here’s a great article on H. G. Wells, Sir Winston Churchill, and the atomic bomb: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33365776)