BLIND LEGIONS
- 2023 - MILLENIUM FILM - NEW YORK, NY -

Printed Circuit Board, Electronics, Speakers, Reclaimed Wood, 18-2 Speaker Wire, CRT Monitors, Video, Hardware, Molted Cicada Shells

An electromechanical insect swarm, enacting an apocalypse narrative via control voltage synced auditory behavior.

The insects rush toward the point of frenzy, blind legions, caught in a momentum of their own making. Larvae twitch in waxen cells, bathed in a honey-colored light, while chitinous wings cut patterns in the pheromone laden air. Drawn ever forward, they fall into the roiling vortex, to die amid bolts of lighting and the smell of ozone.

PHOTO: ANDRES MERCADO

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Blind Legions uses the behavior of circuitry to convey an apocalyptic narrative: the story a catastrophic event brought about by civilization-wide momentum and exponentially increasing rates of change. Incorporating a series of sonic sculptural works designed over a two year period, Blind Legions realizes their full modular potential, synchronizing behavior via analog control signals in service of a unified narrative.

Swarms of electromechanical insects feed off their collective momentum, hurtling towards a doom of their own making. Simultaneously, a series of video works are modulated in time with the swarm behavior, pushed towards incomprehensibility during the exponential rise and lingering as solitary impressions within the apocalyptic fall.

Blind Legions is a meditation on our modern conception of apocalypse. Within a cultural and material system predicated upon infinite progress, it becomes necessary that we envision a cataclysmic event which might bring instantaneous resolution to this otherwise unsustainable momentum. Blind Legions serves simultaneously to envision the reality of this event, in all it’s inevitability and horror, and to imagine the ways in which this conception may be artificial, a convenient substitute for the true reality of time; as a process unending and beyond human comprehension, moving in a direction all its own.


VIDEO: TOMI FAISON, AUDIO RECORDED LIVE USING 3Dio BINAURAL MICROPHONE