Petar John — Furies
Reviewed by Leah Davis

Petar John’s Furies is an otherworldly exploration of digital landscapes presented as a persistent, slow-moving flyover. At first glance, the shapes filling our field of vision seem appropriately terrestrial. Cliffs and hills and a dry river bed are presented in bioluminescent blues and greens. Every few seconds, the landscape ripples like a reflection on disturbed water. I flinch. The ripples are disruptive. They move quickly, less like water now, more like sound. Shapes I had previously organized into land masses are now a series of lightly glowing dots. “Data,” I think. “Sonar.” Pings blast outward from the viewer’s perspective, moving faster than we’re allowed to progress. Distant canyon formations emerge in response to our sonic inquiry. Is the canyon being built as we go or is it merely being revealed? The world vibrates and it strikes me that both things can be true. John explains that Furies is a 360˚music video that depicts “undiscovered landscapes and the very nature of our human existence to make those landscapes our own.” It was commissioned as a music video for HRZL’s track Furies 03 using open source point clouds “from Open Topography and Global Digital Heritage, counting up to 10 million points in total.” The piece has a hypnotic sort of rhythm that encourages everyone in the theater to relax into the ambiguity of evolving space. Until it doesn’t. As in a dream, we stumble forward, unable to remain in our state of perfect exploration. Our sonar hits a wall and mystery recedes. Canyons give way to static brown factories. There is nothing left for us to discover.