Vandalisme

2022

The vandalisation of Van Gogh's flowers, Monet's grain stacks, and King Charles' wax statue is the raging consequence of the so-called "Eco-Anxiety", afflicting more and more the young population. The felt despair for the progressing environmental degradation is violently expressed by a generation tired of the institutional "practical indifference" towards a problem that the scientific community has cried out since the '60s. Indeed, a series of provocations aiming to shake a public that, despite climate change is becoming the daily newspaper's main headline, turn the page and head away. However, individuals might be considered victims, led towards this negligence by institutions that, trhough "eco-rhetorics", blame the ordinary citizen despite 70% of the global pollution resulting from a dozen corporations' activities. The unrestrained production of goods and its consumerism paved the way to a new supposed epoch, the Anthropocene; a novel geologic era considered a cul de sac. The effects of human actions on the planet have passed a no-return point, endangering not only the natural heritage but society as we know and, in the most catastrophic predictions, human existence itself. Perhaps it is for this reason, almost as an unconscious bias, that "Digital preservation" is becoming a surging conservation method. In perpetuating immaterial pieces of information to overcome the physical limits, virtual avatars of living flora and fauna are being safeguarded, and new life is given to forever-lost species. In our ecological future, being unbounded by the physical condition will probably be the only possibility to survive, at least to maintain a perfect remembrance to whoever will come after the catastrophe. The human being can be the next specie to be digitalised in an interactive diorama analogous to the one devised by Steensen. However, the virtual copies will not be immersed in a dreamlike natural landscape but in the "naturally artificial" space of the last humanity, forever depicting the self-inflicted defacing disconnection from nature. As such, the vandalised virtual portrayal will only be able to display a vandalised self-portrait, a memorandum of the egocentric's triumph.