by kelly kong

Amidst the hostile armies and the city set ablaze in the Hell panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights stands an exit filled with beams of ethereal light radiating from an unknown source; small crowds of people scatter within the glow—it’s unclear whether they are stagnant or parting ways with Hell. The destination beyond the gates is also undetermined—the only way out of the inferno only leads to another untraveled plane, one perhaps more diabolical than the last. In Scattered All Over the Earth by Yoko Tawada, Susanoo experiences infernal in circularity in a displaced world marked by robots and humans taking on different personalities. As Susanoo broke off his relationship with his father due to the overwhelming illusion of robots bearing human characteristics, he found himself craving Hiruko’s portrayal of his father, marking his re-subscription to fantasy. The ever-altering technologies and perplexities of the world got ahead of his escape. The definitive boundary between the human, the animalistic, and the artificial merged. As indicated by Dean Kissick’s article in the archive section, Bosch’s hell feels so relevant because we are living amid falling bounds: “Whatever they may be it seems the farther we travel into Hell, the more the boundaries between things, and the difference in scale, fall apart.” As Arendt highlights, the human condition has detached itself from Earth with its technological innovations—men are no longer imprisoned by gravity, thereby revamping what confinement and freedom truly mean. When the Sputnik was first launched, so was an escape route. Simultaneously, the sense of breaking free also established the amorphous “space” as the elusive destination, thereby making Earth seem like a prison and its inhabitants the prisoners.
Space is still an inconceivable notion, never mind a habitat. In the ethereal exit out of hellfire, I wonder about our modern tendency to relate the infernal to the present directly. How can we help ourselves when buried within a hellscape only meant for escape? At the very bottom of my composite images lies an image of Sputnik, whose creation realized the possibility of escape and confirmed Earth’s status as the rendered prison. I placed the globe from Holbein’s The Ambassadors on top of Sputnik to transpose the sense of weightlessness that the Earth—an minuscule object sandwiched by two larger-than-life ambassadors—holds in the painting. The superimposition upon Sputnik also communicates the mobility humans feel upon our habitat: the illusion that we can still maintain civilization and cultural richness amidst mass displacement. Upon the globe lies a still image from Michel Gondry’s 2004 movie, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. In the scene, Joel (Jim Carrey) undergoes a voluntary memory erasure to get rid of memories from his past relationship. The aftermath of such procedures is not quite spotless, ultimately demonstrating the consequences of misusing technology to alter our past and current realities. Avoidance landed Joel back with the partner he broke up with pre-procedure, and the circularity trials him with this relationship again at the end of the movie. Gondry’s work not only speaks to the theme of circularity in escaping unpleasantries in Bosch’s painting but also the danger of our unawareness during deliberate erasure—in Eternal Sunshine, patients undergo memory erasing during sleep with little autonomy and control to fight back against their past decision. 
A scene from the Seattle production of Tony Kusher’s Angels in America sits on the south pole of the globe and Sputnik. Amidst its multitude of motifs and symbols, the ghostly angel of the play represents a light for redemption—not in the easy-way-out method, but through choosing to stay alive and trudge through pain, purgatory, and the deathbed. Directly opposing this image is Ai Weiwei’s iconic Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn. Taking it out of the context of the cultural revolution, the piece portrays the nuance and danger of technological progression—are we layering upon our history, or are our innovations dictating us, erasing, “destroying the old world” to construct the new one?