At The Never
An immersive audiovisual work — animation, original music, and prose fiction — built for the end times.
The work sits at the intersection of post-postmodern collapse and a cultural moment defined by permanent adolescence — a civilisation that has aestheticised youth, optimised for distraction, and deferred existential reckoning indefinitely. The Never people are us: waiting, occasionally coupling, consuming fashion, watching others leave for somewhere they cannot quite bring themselves to go.
Against this the work deploys the language of progressive pop, disco, and techno — genres historically bound to pleasure, the body, and the dancefloor — as a structural irony. The music does not illustrate doom; it enacts the mechanism of denial. You dance because you cannot look directly at it.
This tension is sharpened by the present cultural moment. As artificial intelligence accelerates toward forms of cognition that render human effort increasingly illegible, the question of what it means to make, to accomplish, to matter becomes newly urgent — and newly unanswerable. In The Land, Never does not resolve this. It sits inside it, aesthetically.
At The Never exists as a navigable live 3D environment — have a digital walk through of mockups of how we imagine presenting the final work within exhibition space.
Slippery, little drops of something shivers over many various horizons, contracting and collapsing pointing to a land. Hidden behind galaxy, called 'Never' by everyone who lives there. The Never people, who don't do much but wait and sometimes have sex. Albeit really aesthetically and with a Confucian sense of the always.
Lately there has been a much talked about new place to go to. A place called 'Die', just on the other side of the 'Never'. Everyone has heard the math is different here somehow. There's wind! That ruffles the hair and something described as 'finality,' Whatever that is?!
They all murmur half ashamed. Nothing's final if never never comes.
Everyone is moving to Die they say. All the fashion outlets have run out of the best clothes and hair spray. It's the only place left to see and to be seen.
Others will stay behind and look through telescopes and receive telegrams through crystal balls, and study all the melting pearl and disco this Die place seems to have.
Maybe envious maybe scared, no one knows for sure. One in three decide to slope and groan around the underside of the Never. It becomes crowded, 5 persons for every million miles.
Oh the luxury of finally letting it collapse, no more containers left in the fridge!
No more laws of physics, just the soft and the howl of space. They melt melt melt holding on blankly into the liquid.
But the ones left are looking, their eyes sweaty on the viewfinders. 'Not for me!' they say under their breaths, too real! But somehow not really real. It's hard to explain unless you've been there. But people who have been there haven't been back. As of yet. Hope Springs Eternal. Everyone has the t-shirt. So kind of hard to say.
Everyone in the Never put their telescopes away as looking became difficult, better to eat their thick milk. While the radio plays something familiar somehow, again and again.
O Future's practice operates at the intersection of the concrete and the esoteric, between the past and the unfurling uncertain future, the handmade and the computational, the deeply analogue and the thoroughly networked. We are interested in what the internet has done to interiority — how the acceleration of image culture, the flattening of temporal experience, and the dissolution of collective meaning have produced a new kind of subject: always connected, perpetually stimulated, and profoundly alone with the oldest questions.
Our ongoing work moves between audio/visual installation, film score, live performance, and publication — always with the same underlying preoccupation: what does it mean to make something, to insist on making something, in a moment that has made meaning newly uncertain? Our answers, we posit, seem to hide in the sweaty human animal playing in the dark against the blue light that breaks our sleep. Always yearning, and never found.
Writing & Voice
ofuture.org