Xanadu, Robert Boyd’s video installation, is at Zilkha gallery through this Sunday. From the CFA website:
Robert Boyd’s Xanadu, a synchronized 4-channel video installation, probes society’s self-destructive impulse while parodying various elements of popular culture such as documentaries, news media, cartoons and pop music. Culled from hundreds of hours of archival footage, they tweak, condense and re-frame modern events into seconds-long image bites, re-presenting history as a series of MTV-style music videos. Do sweet dreams of suicide cults, mass annihilation, genocide and the Apocalypse all become part of a self-fulfilling prophecy? Set to saccharin dance tracks, the Xanadu videos suggest that humanity is not apathetic about its own demise, but on the contrary, it secretly desires it.
Just for reference, Zilka is open Thursday from 12pm-4pm, Friday from 12pm to 8pm, and Saturday and Sunday from 12pm to 4pm.