Part of: MOAT, Archive Department Archive No. 2666/4091067W2024 (MOAT/AR/002)
Video (8:09, found image assembly), digital drawing, glass
The installation opens into the ruins of an archive. At its centre, a video document released by the Ministry of Artificial Truth. It is the memories of the last human alive in 2666, divided into five sections: the weather forecast, news about cats, a biological study, memories of the mother, and the phone call.
Every image in the document is found online, including science fiction cinema, television news, and internet memes. The narration is written in a language that has appropriated the inner logic of propaganda. The collision is absurd, and the absurdity is the subject. An image of memory produced by a voice that has learned how earlier voices once worked.
This is the first operational prototype of MOAT. It imagines the moment at which an artificial authority, having inherited not only the vocabulary but the operating logic of twentieth-century authoritarian language, begins to issue our memories back to us and asks whether we will still be able to tell that this has happened. The Ministry’s later publications will investigate this inheritance directly; this prototype stages it as a spectacle.
Xy June Li 