Community

The installation Community consists of 5 video projections and sound. Each video shows the cooling down of an animal’s body after its death, recorded with a heat-sensitive infrared camera. The life-size videos are projected onto round surfaces. Durations of the videos vary from 2 to 5 hours, over this duration the image of the animal slowly vanishes from the screen, as its body loses heat. Spectators, gathered around the disappearing images, become part of the scenery. Entropy is a measure of a system’s tendency towards spontaneous change, it describes the process of the increase of disorder in the universe. All systems tend to progress in the direction of increasing entropy; differences between states and entities gradually disappear. Entropy also suggests an arrow of time: the process of entropy is irreversible. As we die, the difference between us and our surroundings vanish. We give away the energy needed to sustain life, we lose the coherent form of our bodies, and finally, we become dust. In times of climate change and the mass production of animal products and other commodities we can see that entropy and death are allied with capitalist economies. The faster the commodities rot, the more effective the circulation of capital. But despite the illusion of an endless return of goods, this process is irreversible, as the law of entropy predicts. Individuals, species, tend to disappear.