Zeynep Burça Oral

disco_inferno.mp4 is a poetic video collage utilising found footage, self-produced and selectively AI-produced material to explore communication through cycles of amateur media self-expression. The video loosely follows two women’s conflicting responses to online communication: the narrator, a woman on the toilet, who offers meta-critical commentary, intellectualising the act of digital interaction, and the Innocent, inspired by the sci-fi trope “sexy born yesterday,” experiences surface-level enjoyment that deteriorates into emotional and physical overwhelm.

The title of the work refers to the phrase Disco Inferno in Latin, translating loosely to 'I learn through suffering'. This pessimism is reflected in ideas of how we experience communication when we are simultaneously overwhelmed and complicit. The work initiates a conversation about conversation, acknowledging the anxious media intellectual within us.

Though I am pessimistic about Media and how it will develop, I think we have to keep discussing how we use it and how the communication is happening within it to keep it under the control of those who use it, and not give it away. We have developed a visual and verbal way of communicating that is horrifyingly and poetically abstract, and we need to engage with it through many perspectives.

We are all just innocent people experiencing almost all of humanity communicating simultaneously, on a small, fragile object.