"Deus X Machina" Arno Coenen and rene Bosma 1996

Deus ex Machina is a virtuoso interplay of filmed and computer animated 3D images, in which a hallucinating endless nightmare reveals itself, and the differences between 'virtual' and 'reality', between dream and reality, have practically disappeared. You see a young man with a bald shaven head driving a car, seemingly purposefully, to a deserted and empty water tower or lighthouse, which he enters, and then climbs the winding stairs. What is he after? He eventually ends up on a chair equipped with a virtual reality set, spectacles and a glove. The man plugs himself in and lands up in a VR program, although...? 'The programme is real', you hear and read it. The chair is spinning round at the speed of light. 'Continue: yes/no?' But does he have a choice? At a crazy speed, different kinds of images, sounds and music succeed one another and intermix: high tech logos, archive images of a war cemetery, a crowd of people, computer images of hanged bodies, of bodies pricked up on sticks, texts... 'Chaos is no more'. Then the man rips the spectacles off and 'escapes' outside. There, the images become abstract... Is the programme still running? Deus ex Machina: The slumbering evil of mankind developed a program which has rendered the human race redundant.


1996, 16'51'' (sound, colour). Collection: NIMk (Netherlands Media Art Institute).
This work is in distribution.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Deus X Machina
• Arno Coenen
• Rene Bosma