Purgatory EDIT is a user-generated montage-based cinematic experience that highlights long-term and deliberate methods in which digital technologies enforce subliminal visual manipulation, sensory overload, data fatigue, psychological reaction, and ideological numbness. At the core of the project is an archive of moving images, a visual semiotic research and analysis process, and a techno-mediated participation-driven cyber performance.

The ‘Doomscroll Archive’ is sourced using war footage, cinema, documentaries, advertisements, newsreels, landscape panoramas, home videos, and other media content. This open-source, publicly accessible, searchable moving image archive comprises 30,000+
clips that testify to the hegemonic representations and the glorification of violence within visual and cinematic vocabularies. The archive serves as material to conduct a ‘conceptual visual vocabulary analysis’ and study keywords like ‘war’, ‘peace’, ‘violence’, and ‘conflict’ through the intersectional lens of violence and conflict resolution, neocolonialism, data hegemony and power relations. This essential study reveals how such concepts are reproduced within moving image media such as documentary, video, and cinema.
Using this archive as the foundational data bank of pre-curated individual ‘scenes’, the technomediated cyber performance of Purgatory EDIT foregrounds the use and potential of experimental cutting-edge technologies such as an EEG-based brainware (Emotiv Epoc X), a bioinformatics & brain interface software developed by the Purgatory EDIT team, Virtual Reality (VR) headsets, and virtual cinema. Using these, participants’ brainwaves can control a real-time juxtaposition of a pre-compiled and curated string of videos – its sequencing, intensities and specific types of video, as well as playback speed, fluctuations, and designed glitches – creating ongoing, ever-changing permutations, generating a seamless,non-looping, unending, and unique cinematic experience.

To run this cyber performance, Ali Akbar Mehta and Jernej Čuček Gerbec will complete the coding and development of software at the EMAP Residency in Werklietz, Halle. Designed to ‘read’ a user’s semi-conscious mind-state and output it as abstract emotions represented as 6 metrics. It enables participants’ emotional activity to control a real-time juxtaposition of a pre-compiled and curated string of videos – it's sequencing, intensities and specific types of video, as well as playback speed, fluctuations, and designed glitches – generates a sequence of videos in ongoing, ever-changing permutations, thereby creating a seamless, non-looping,
unending, and unique cinematic experience – every time it is accessed. This software and accompanying ‘Brainware’, a portable EEG kit, works as a fuzzy controller that is difficult to control with precision allows participants varying degrees of looseness and ability to ‘play’ with the process – as participants struggle to obtain a degree of control, trying to will their subconscious into creating specific sequences, often attempts to soothe/agitate their minds has unexpected results.