Listen to MP3 Commentary by
Pete Moraites and Eric Scott
(Salvador Dalek)

Ragnarok-N-Roll

I’m a total creativity junkie and my jonesing got me to use frequent flier miles and borrowed money to get to RISD for Tomato’s fall workshop.

During the party on the last night, There was a ruckus at the corner in the form of a migrating war protest in the form of a colossal pillow fight. I was amused by how the face of protest had changed since the early media images of the 60s of somber faces and angry faces to this display of mirth and humor and embracing, rather than disparaging, our combative side as a more playful nature. Our sense of humor is returning… we’ve rounded the corner… the joke of war has crested the punchline…
I grabbed a bunch of clips with the night vision MPEG function on my trusty digital camera. When I got them home and pushed the contrast and stretched the timings on the clips, some of them took on this eerie menacing quality. I decided to use this to the same effect as the protest itself… to create an image of menace and then defuse it by letting it unwind into a real time celebration and play.

The music had gone through a couple of political titlings until I paired it with this visual and it all came together as one of my current thoughts on rethinking the apocalypse as an evolutionary transformation rather than as some pan global extinction episode. Gods and Humans have realised we’re all made of the same stuff… physics and faith have all revealed us as immortal. What context does war take on when we are beyond death? What then of all your perceptions of having been done wrong? No harm no foul. Ragnarok-n-Roll with it, baby.