Focus on: The Imperium of Koom Posh (2014)

With its five-part projection, Robert Darroll’s experimental animated film The Imperium of Koom Posh visualizes the state of human existence in a world where social life is dominated by global media technology and capitalist systems. The name Koom Posh refers to the novel The Coming Race by English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The latter derived the name from a homonymic Chinese term roughly meaning “government of the many,” or “government of the most unknowing.” Robert Darroll’s artistic interest was concentrated on the audiovisual rendering of the alienation of human beings in a thoroughly technological world, in which every individual’s perception is defined by such media technology as surveillance cameras. In parallel projection, each of the five projected panels thematizes a different vision – in which socially standardized human beings, driven by time and lost in endless space, find themselves in various states of impotence. Darroll develops a world plagued by drone warfare, violence and terror, in which human life has been reduced to leading a hollow, puppet existence, far from using one’s own mind. 

Credits:

Concept and Design: Robert Darroll
Sound Composition: Sean Reed

Sound mixed and mastered by Duane Shimmel and Nate B. Aldrich at the Innovative Media Research and Commercialization Center of the University of Maine at Orono with the assistance of the composer.

Video Documentary:

ZKM | Institute for Visual Media

Camera: Martina Rotzal, Christina Zartmann
Editing: Christina Zartmann
Voice: Rabea Rahmig
Text: Carmen Beckenbach