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»Shattered Glass« | Tim Ra
The video work shows the United States, hijacked by authoritarian and far-right forces, in dense, surreal image sequences – not as a purely documentary finding, but as a fever dream in which the icons of American power and significance are reflected in a post-apocalyptic future.
The spoken text employs drinking metaphors. »Sipping dreams / sipping fears from a red cup« and »Democracy on the rocks« are both bar jargon and shipwreck in one. The text names the mechanics of decay – »demagogues rise, division thrives, freedom fades« – and its own medium: the »grand old vision,« now »caught up in AI rendition.«.
The work knows that it tells of the decay of the present with the tools of the present. The end is not comfort, but a movement: »searching for the truth through the cracks and fractured beams«. The shattered glass of the title is both evidence and optics. Light falls through the cracks; whoever looks through the fissures has stopped believing the facade. That is precisely where the search begins.
Shattered Glass | Music Video | 2:40 | 2025