THE FUTURE I WANT WILL REQUIRE AN UNFATHOMABLE AMOUNT OF VIOLENCE

Artists: Federico Gentile, Martina Fiori IG: @former__group, @arte.nvda Three channel video installation (00:12:30) Structures (40x100x30cm): metal profiles, LCD displays, ratchet straps, cabling The Future I Want Will Require an Unfathomable Amount of Violence is a multi-screen video installation assembled from the visual archive of the Internet: war footage, television broadcasts, natural disasters, amateur recordings, viral videos, memes and anomalous fragments circulated through social media. The work investigates what happens when images of extreme violence and catastrophe enter the same continuous stream as entertainment, advertising, personal memories and the ordinary documentation of everyday life. Within the architecture of the feed, radically different events are compressed into the same temporal and visual space, appearing for a few seconds before being displaced by the next image. Scrolling becomes both the subject of the work and its formal principle. The fragmented montage reproduces the unstable rhythm of online consumption: accumulation, interruption, repetition and sudden changes of register replace linear narration. Images are encountered rapidly, often without the time or context necessary for them to settle into memory. The installation focuses particularly on a generation whose perception of the world has developed alongside permanent connectivity. War, environmental catastrophe and political instability are no longer encountered exclusively through the mediated language of television or journalism, but through vertical videos, livestreams, surveillance recordings, memes and first-person imagery produced and circulated by those directly involved. The resulting landscape is one of permanent crisis, not only because of the events represented, but because of the conditions under which they are seen. Violence becomes simultaneously distant and intimate, exceptional and ordinary, unbearable and endlessly reproducible. The work ultimately asks what it means to witness a world through interfaces designed to make us continue looking. In a media environment where catastrophe never fully interrupts the flow, the distinction between observing, understanding and consuming violence becomes increasingly unstable.