DIGITAL VIDEO WALL

The Violent Sequence is a silent, multi channel video inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 feature film Zabriskie Point. Antonioni’s first and only Hollywood feature is set in a 1970’s era climate of youth counterculture in the United States. The original film pictures a stylized rejection of commercial and consumer culture and much of the original film was shot on location in the wasteland of Death Valley, California. The film was an overwhelming commercial failure and was panned by most critics upon its release.

The Violent Sequence takes its name from the title of a Pink Floyd song scored for the final scene of Antonio’s film. The song, eventually cut by the director, does not appear on the film’s original soundtrack, but is still used to refer to the final, climatic scene of the film. The final scene—known as ‘the violent sequence’—presents a luxurious hillside mansion explode in a slow-motion montage of orange flame and exploding household items.

Costa’s version of The Violent Sequence is a meditation on the attraction and trappings of consumerism and desire in an on-demand world. Rather than presenting a scene in which household items and objects of mass-production are destroyed, Costa posits another version of reality. The multichannel video pictures an endless sequence in which an array of commercial objects and products orbit, surround and tempt us in a contradicting, slowed down vision of beauty and repulsion.