Eternal Boglap

Eternal Boglap 2016
Erin Coates, in collaboration with Neil Aldum and Simone Johnston
SUV wreck, 2-channel video projection, duration: 3:31 mins
sound design: Stuart James
video editing: Erin Coates

The relationship between cinematic vision and the moving image seen from a car has been explored in several of Erin Coates’s past works, and returned in Rumblestrip as a full scale SUV car-cinema. Eternal Boglap offered a ghetto-VR driving experience, with two opposing rear projection screens transecting a 4WD car body, the back screen simultaneously visible through a rearview mirror. Shot on a freight highway outside of Perth at night, the video in Eternal Boglap represents the West as an endless roadtrip, where the only element is a halo of bitumen lit by the car headlights. As the car hurtles down the highway, figures appear on the road, moving toward the windscreen at odds with the speed of the road. Spectres of ecological disaster and harbingers of resource depletion, they swagger, hover and shuffle towards the screen. Grim as they sound, these are not joyless figures, instead they revel in the chaos, riding tidal waves by kayak, glowing in atomic glory and teetering in high heels and absurd salvaged assemblage couture.

Eternal Boglap was first screened inside a car-cinema at Rumblestrip.