“Apocallapse” is the third part of the series “Black Hole of Knowledge” by Jier JIANG.
The title is a portmanteau of “apocalypse” and “collapse”, referring to the very impossibility of writing a new revelation after the total collapse of civilization — the structure of possibility itself has already failed. The work envisions a catastrophic scenario: after the extinction of human civilization, a mysterious entity from another part of the universe arrives on Earth and begins an archaeological excavation from a non-human perspective. The viewer is placed in a paradoxical position — that of a “god of the new world,” though this position is, in truth, unsustainable.Each piece appears as a failed device: a broken time machine, an interrupted linguistic system, an unfinished archival mechanism. The artist offers no answers, but instead poses an unavoidable question:
Why did human civilization collapse?
Apocallapse, Diary 01
Interactive installation, sculpture
Clock, butterfly specimen, glass, wood, serpentine, alabaster, A4 paper. (Printed content © CIA)
"Based on my exploration of human history, the object displayed here could well be a failed time machine. The reason is simple: their scientists had a habit of conducting experiments on animals and insects. Yet each butterfly here embodies death at every moment — and one of them even entered the machine itself, trapped by its meticulous order. I reach out, stirring through these ruins, wondering whether the flap of a butterfly's wings could trigger a nuclear explosion. Could the desire to manipulate corpses and destroy life be the ultimate cause of humanity's self-destruction?
Indeed, my journey aims precisely to exhume what remains unspeakable in this lost civilization. According to the archives, their archaeologists and linguists — until the very end — refused to acknowledge the linguistic legitimacy of the seven symbols unearthed at the Sanxingdui site in China. As a result, this even more ancient 'civilization' remained, for them, an unpassable black hole — and they perished carrying this unresolved enigma with them.
Now, beneath a stone engraved with the only seven symbols of Sanxingdui, lies a pile of regularly declassified CIA documents. Here, impossible writings intersect with a revealed 'truth'. These documents recount humanity’s attempts to perceive distant spaces remotely and to transcend the boundaries of consciousness and temporality — thus revealing obscured truths: they may well have served as reference material in the construction of their time machine. My research report might as well be titled: Apoca...llapse... According to psychoanalytic theory, a slip of the tongue signals the intrusion of the Real. Could it be that I, too, have an unconscious? The name fits perfectly — after all, there will never be a new world again."
Apocallapse, Diary 2
Interactive installation, sculpture, shou sugi ban, video,
Burnt clock casing, alabaster, photo print on acrylic, light bulbs, photo print on transparent film, Arduino
“A museum display case? Or the empty shell of a clock? Both forms collapse into a third:
a tomb. Time has stopped here. On it rests a neo-Assyrian stele. At first, I mistook it for Sumerian — a point of origin for language, forgotten before it was even understood. Yet it is there that history was built, where technique began to calculate, where war became conceivable. With hindsight, I wonder: isn’t this the same error human archaeologists make? We reconstruct civilizations from fragments, without knowing whether what we piece together is true. Understanding may only be a delayed misunderstanding — a forced reading through languages that are too recent.
A hole in the carcass draws my gaze. What glimmers is an archival image: a mineral specimen fused with a supernova. When I fix my eyes on it, a mechanism is triggered. To the left, a stele embedded with blue mineral powder lights up; a voice attempts to justify the collapse through scientific discourse. The words sound like a final defense of disaster. Then the red stele lights up on the right. The tone changes — icy, fragmented, brutal. No explanation — only exposure. Harsh truths pierce through a broken language.
This red/blue binary perhaps refers to a core narrative myth of the human network: The Matrix, with its illusion of choice.
There is no free will. If I hear one voice rather than the other, it’s because a random algorithm decided which light and sound to activate. Even I cannot escape it.
These branches — a final ritual for some deity? Covered in alabaster powder, they seem to fossilize slowly over time. Does the rotting wood still deserve preservation through the Japanese technique of shou sugi ban? Does a civilization that has already ended still need to be saved?
My gaze returns to the sculpted hand. It seems to raise a mysterious object — as if to rescue something from the wreck. This gesture reminds me of Noah’s Ark: an act of stubborn salvation, already hopeless. Then my eyes fall on the obsidian sphere. It says nothing. But it seems to know everything.
Apocallapse Diary 03
intallation
“This pendulum may be a detached fragment from the same ensemble as the two time machines I discovered two days ago. It sinks into an electronic screen, similar to those “black mirrors” once obsessively gazed upon by humanity.
Before the collapse of their civilization, humans stared endlessly into such devices. Their own image, as well as that of the world, was reflected on this smooth surface. But what the screen showed was merely a reflection of reality — a simulacrum of a simulacrum. Now, the mirror is shattered, the layers of illusion have collapsed, and the internal components lie exposed. I suppose that before their disappearance, humans had become lost in an obsession with information. Through omnipresent screens, they immersed themselves in a flood of images and signs, wandering in a labyrinth of data until they lost all sense of real time.
This black mirror was no doubt a relic of that frenzy: once, it glowed, saturated with messages, capturing millions of gazes.
As for the pendulum inserted into the screen, I believe it was a desperate attempt to repair the broken chronology using a “time pendulum.” A symbol of ancient clockwork mechanisms, its steady oscillation embodied the rhythm of time.
Perhaps, in the end, a programmer planted it there, hoping to awaken time frozen in place with a familiar cadence.
The experiment failed. The pendulum is motionless. The pulse of time does not return. But the shards of liquid crystal still gleam with a mineral light.
However advanced it may have been, human civilization could not hold onto time. The beating of clocks stopped here, while duration — immeasurable — continues to flow in silence. Despite the precision of their theories, it seems that in the end, Bergson defeated Einstein.
At the heart of the black hole? There is only void.