News from Nowhere: Eclipse

The duo’s latest video installation, News from Nowhere: Eclipse, presents a man stranded at sea with a lifeboat as his home. Flickering LED lights in a huge grid-like structure, which are synchronized with the sound, surround the video and occupy the whole room, fully immersing the viewer. A metaphor for humanity’s innate tendency to fight off solitude, the man lost at sea paradoxically counts the days of his isolation in what seems like an infinite loop of time. The process of his wandering about the endless open sea in search for other survivors is in fact part of a virtual reality world. Intentionally blurring the boundaries between reality and the metaverse, the video mirrors today’s porous borders between the physical and the virtual. As if lost in the vast unknown of new virtual worlds, the protagonist faces a struggle evocative of humanity’s positioning amidst a rapidly changing society. With a protagonist whose name and back story remain unknown, and in a setting as anonymous as its main character, the work provides no answers but only asks to poetically reflect on our fluctuating, present times.

News from Nowhere: Eclipse © Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho
Presented and Commissioned by RCRC and Riyadh Art