Messages from a land of impending pastel doom (they live): First Approach
Single-channel video, silent, color
3:48 (looped)
2011




Messages from a land of impending pastel doom (they live): Second Approach
Single-channel video, silent, color
0:45 (looped)
2011




Messages from a land of impending pastel doom (they live): Third Approach
Single-channel video, silent, color
0:08 (looped)
2011




Messages from a land of impending pastel doom (they live): Fourth Approach
Single-channel video, silent, color
0:08 (looped)
2011




Messages from a land of impending pastel doom (they live): Fifth Approach
Single-channel video, silent, color
1:57 (looped)
2011




Messages from a land of impending pastel doom (they live): Sixth Approach
Single-channel video, silent, color
0:45 (looped)
2011




Messages from a land of impending pastel doom (they live): Seventh Approach
Single-channel video, silent, color
0:24 (looped)
2011




Messages from a land of impending pastel doom (they live): Eighth Approach
Single-channel video, silent, color
0:07 (looped)
2011




Messages from a land of impending pastel doom (they live): Ninth Approach
Single-channel video, silent, color
1:37 (looped)
2011




Messages from a land of impending pastel doom (they live): Tenth Approach
Single-channel video, silent, color
1:55 (looped)
2011




Messages from a land of impending pastel doom (they live): Eleventh Approach
Single-channel video, silent, color
0:11 (looped)
2011




Messages from a land of impending pastel doom (they live): Twelfth Approach
Single-channel video, silent, color
6:39 (looped)
2011




Messages from a land of impending pastel doom (they live): Thirteenth Approach
Single-channel video, silent, color
0:26 (looped)
2011




Messages from a land of impending pastel doom (they live): Fourteenth Approach
Single-channel video, silent, color
2:22 (looped)
2011




Messages from a land of impending pastel doom (they live): Fifteenth Approach
Single-channel video, silent, color
0:32 (looped)
2011




Messages from a land of impending pastel doom (they live): Sixteenth Approach
Single-channel video, silent, color
1:40 (looped)
2011




Messages from a land of impending pastel doom (they live): Seventeenth Approach
Single-channel video, silent, color
1:20 (looped)
2011




Messages from a land of impending pastel doom (they live): Eighteenth Approach
Single-channel video, silent, color
0:35 (looped)
2011




Messages from a land of impending pastel doom (they live): Nineteenth Approach
Single-channel video, silent, color
0:46 (looped)
2011




The recent reentry of NASA's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) led to a spate of YouTube hoax videos claiming to document satellite debris. The videos are geographically diverse, with sightings reported from Western Canada, Italy, Poland, Chile, Texas, and Oklahoma (the best guess is that the satellite landed somewhere in the North Pacific). This series of videos takes up the hoaxers’ attempts to produce visible evidence of an absent threat. The expected tactics of increasing visibility--altering brightness/contrast and saturation--are here taken to an absurd degree.

 

The UARS hoaxers take advantage of the fact that, through the pixelated vision of a cellphone camera, one bright thing in the sky pretty much looks like all of the other bright things in the sky--that each image of a star can also be a plummeting chunk of radioactive space junk, as long as that’s what you call it. Messages from a land of impeding pastel doom (they live) basically agrees with the hoaxers, except the impending disaster has nothing to do with bright lights in the sky, but instead the hoax videos themselves.