JUGGERNAUT
2009
Single channel video , 21 min. 08 sec
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The gigantic apparatus that humans have created to improve their way of living, endless machines, abandoned buildings that once stood new and beautiful and utopian model cities that fail to function, all now stand dry and lonely.
This is a world of new ideas, new opportunities, new ways of living, with more conveniences and endless quests of forwardness. The narrator’s voice in the 1940 clip produced by General Motors “To New Horizons”, promises an unachievable near future. The 1960s were far different from how some planned them to be; not to mention the decades to follow…
We watch a group of men gathered in a meeting room discussing and observing plane models. Here on a big V-shaped table the development of aviation is seen as the main key for progress. Old NASA space program clips and frames from Walt Disney propaganda cartoons are inserted into the video to form a combination of found and shot material. The presence of nuclear missiles, the menace of war and destruction on an international scale and the implied power that is given to a specific group of men to order humankind are here described as Juggernaut.
Juggernaut comes from the Sanskrit Jagannatha. It implies The Lord of the Universe, a name for god Krishna. It also means an unstoppable force that destroys everything in its path.
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