THE NEW FREEDOM FOUNDERS

In this three channel video installation, Duke and Battersby explore basic philosophical issues such as time, language, revolution, and the paradigms of insanity. Each of the three channels runs a different short narrative. The narratives deploy tropes from genres as diverse as science fiction, French New Wave Cinema, Hollywood Film and Television, and 70’s conceptual video. The work interrogates identification without abandoning it as a strategy, simultaneously engaging the viewer with the characters, and exposing the ridiculous nature of that engagement. “With this project, we aim to clear a psycho-spiritual space for the viewer which was not cleared before. We want this space to contain empathy (identification) and joy. We want to achieve, in the making of the works, a sensation of ecstatic transformation, because it is our conviction that if such a sensation is present in the making of the works, that sensation will become available to the viewer. In order to clear this new space, we must not default to familiar tropes. The work must seem mostly unfamiliar, even uncanny. It cannot, however, be so unfamiliar as to repel the viewer. Offering the viewer a place to sit between convention or cliché and confusion, boredom or repulsion is our project with The New Freedom Founders. We know we are destined to mostly fail, but we believe that by simply representing our attempt, we will in some measure reach our goal.”