RICHARD
GRAYSON
The
Golden Space City of God
Video
Installation - 2009
Duration: 45 Mins. HD video
The Golden Space City of God is a large scale video installation featuring a 26 piece choir singing an unaccompanied choral work. The libretto was developed from a website linked to the heterodox Christian cult 'The Family', a group who developed from the earlier Children of God of the sixties. This site, (which seemed to date from the late nineties and which has since disappeared) consisted of detailed predictions of events leading up to the end of the world.The text is a shortened version of these and the basis of a choral work written by composer Leo Chadburn.
The Golden Space City of God describes how widespread economic and social unrest spreads across the globe after an oil crisis and the collapse of dollar based economies. A world leader emerges (assisted by UFOs) who establishes a world-wide government through his use of credit, barcodes, computer technology and pin numbers. Through UNESCO and the European Economic Community he builds a giant robot and abolishes Capitalism. Jesus returns to Earth to fight against this new empire and establish a kingdom of the saved. A thousand years pass where the survivors live in an ideal agrarian economy and the elect, who have been given new supernatural indestructible bodies, rule over the rest of human kind through the power of invisibility. The masses rise again only to be defeated by fire and plague. God descends in a space ship - the Golden Space City - to take the elect away with him to explore and colonise new planets and galaxies.
Essentially these are events drawn from the Book of Revelation re-imagined and described through the images and languages of science fiction.
The text is foregrounded in the video work through the words appearing on screen in synch to the performance.
Commissioned and produced by Artpace San Antonio and Matt's Gallery London
The Golden Space City of God - Drawings 2009-10
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