Publisher's Synopsis
Drone and Apocalypse is an exhibit catalog for a retrospective of twenty-first-century art. Its narrator, Cynthia Wey, is a failed artist convinced that apocalypse is imminent. She writes critical essays delineating apocalyptic tendencies in drone music and contemporary art. Interspersed amid these essays are âspeculative artworksâ, Weyâs term for descriptions of artworks she never constructs that center around the extinction of humanity. Weyâs favorite musicians are drone artists like William Basinski, Celer, Thomas Köner, Les Rallizes Dénudés, and Ãliane Radigue, and her essays relate their works to moments of ineffability in Herodotus, Aristotle, Plato, Pliny the Elder, Isidore of Seville, Robert Burton, Hegel, and Dostoyevsky. Well after Weyâs demise, the apocalypse never arrives, but Weyâs journal is discovered. Curators fascinated with twenty-first-century culture use her writings as the basis for their exhibit âCommentaries on the Apocalypseâ, which realizes Weyâs speculative artworks as photographs, collages, and sound/video installations.
