The Collision Choir
The Collision Choir explores a department store liquidated by capitalism’s slow, decaying end. You crash and collide, discounting products past zero. You roll through twenty impossible departments, smashing jewelry, books, model homes, televisions, medical equipment, cars, cutlery, lamps, fake gardens and stubborn leftovers. The store and its departments are revealed through the store’s history. Clerks chanting prices inside a meat locker, architects burying brass tags beneath concrete columns, executives feeding keys into metal bowls, computers recording purchases nobody made.
The store grew from six aisles into something larger than the city around it, a retail organism. And liquidation now means destroying.
The work is a demolition machine trapped inside a sales catalogue. Collisions splinter objects into scraps, text, receipts, noises and little commercial afterlives. Old-film photographs shake inside department notices. Strange creatures arrive from your collisions. They sing across the screen. The more you break, the more the store tells you about itself, eventually opening ten endings. Architectural memories, employee stories, failed rituals, rooms that should not fit inside other rooms.
None of these endings actually end anything. You close them and keep rolling. Somewhere inside all that broken merchandise is a very simple problem, the store cannot imagine a world where nothing is being purchased. The destructions you create become another kind of sale, receipts are printed, waiting for you to hit something else.
Jason Nelson is a digital poet, artist and creator of strange interactive creatures. His digital works have won 14 international awards and been featured around the world in big and small places. He lives in Norway, where he’s a Professor at the University of Bergen and a PI in the Center for Digital Narrative, an SFF Research Center.
