Purgatory EDIT (2022-ongoing) is a user-generated montage-based cinematic experience. At the core of this project is an artist-assembled media archive titled the Doomscroll Archive, a visual semiotic research and analysis process culminating as a Violence Intensity Map, and an immersive, technomediated cyber performance.

The Doomscroll Archive is sourced using war footage, cinema, documentaries, advertisements, newsreels, landscape panoramas, home videos, online content, and the personal archives of its contributors. Containing 40,000+ entries representing various forms of violence-conflict-trauma, the open-source, publicly accessible, searchable archive testifies to the presence of hegemonic (post)representation and the glorification of violence within visual and cinematic vocabularies.

The archive serves as material to conduct a visual vocabulary analysis and research to categorise forms of violence to generate a comprehensive typology, culminating as a relational Violence Intensity Map that explores the complex relationships between peace and conflict. This essential study reveals and investigates how such concepts are reconfigured and reproduced within the ‘un/order’ of moving image media.

The cyber performance invites individual audience members as participants to investigate the archive using their own emotional, neural and cognitive agency via a portable EEG ‘brainware’, a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI), through software developed by the artist. Using these, participants’ brainwaves are translated to ‘emotion-based metrics’ that control the real-time sequencing, juxtaposition, and playback of individual clips in the archive – thereby generating unique conceptual montages that reveal each participant’s unique relationship to cinematic vocabularies of violence.

By critically engaging with the methods of depiction and the existing glorification of violence in popular culture, and in fact our daily (online and afk) lives, the metanarratives of Purgatory EDIT open the floodgates of abject knowledge(s) and distill the representation of overlooked bodies, data, networks, and ecologies. It asks, how can artistic imagination affect politics of power, violence and justice? What role may poetry have in a world space generated by code?

It invites you to respond to a historic and immediate past as it inadvertently shapes speculative futures, creating data worlds that mirror and shadow our own – worlds that sing about the dark times – prophetic of a world hurtling towards a cataclysmic end, yet pregnant with utopian promise – simultaneously transcending borders while witnessing struggles over openness and enclosure, sovereignty and nationalism, citizenship and identity, security and freedom.

Purgatory EDIT is created by Ali Akbar Mehta , in collaboration with Jernej Čuček Gerbec, Palash Mukhopadhyay, and Anoushkaa Bhatnagar, with additional inputs by Sanyam Varun, Adnan Mirza, Pruthu Parab, Aditya Rokade, Koshy Brahmatmaj, Anjni Gupta, and Yuki Elias.