Mondo64 No155 2021

Serialized as no. 155, the work critiques the contemporary obsession with collecting, saving, and categorizing ephemera. We are all archivists now, hoarding screenshots, memes, and news alerts. But to what end? Mondo64 suggests that this accumulation does not produce wisdom — only fatigue. Each numbered entry adds to a mountain of mediated horror that no one will ever fully watch. The 2021 viewer, trapped between burnout and curiosity, recognizes themselves in the work’s compulsive, joyless cataloging of the bizarre.

Unlike linear cinema, no. 155 unfolds as a cascade of short, disorienting segments. Glitched footage of abandoned shopping malls cuts to a grainy simulation of a live-streamed surgery, then to a child’s toy spinning in slow motion against a distorted synth drone. There is no narrator, no guiding moral voice — only the cold succession of images. This structure mirrors the experience of doomscrolling: each clip bleeds into the next, meaning suspended, affect flattened. The work’s 2021 context is crucial. After months of lockdown, real-world violence and online performance became indistinguishable. no. 155 captures that numbness: the mondoscape is no longer foreign rituals but the familiar made grotesque. mondo64 no155 2021

The original Mondo Cane (1962) shocked audiences with its faux-documentary juxtaposition of grotesque rituals and cultural oddities. By 2021, the “mondo” impulse has not disappeared — it has migrated to YouTube rabbit holes, Reddit archives, and TikTok deep dives. Mondo64 no. 155 updates this genre for the digital native. The “64” in its title alludes simultaneously to the Commodore 64 generation (a nod to lo-fi, pixelated memory) and to 64-bit processing, suggesting a world rendered in blocky, fragmented clarity. The number “155” implies a series — an archive where earlier entries exist unseen, reinforcing the feeling that we have entered a vast, indifferent collection of disturbing curiosities. Serialized as no

Visually, Mondo64 no. 155 employs what might be called “degraded resolution realism.” Textures are chunky, colors are oversaturated or drained, and digital artifacts bloom across the frame like electronic bruises. This is not poor craftsmanship but deliberate style — a recognition that truth in 2021 is always compressed, re-encoded, and corrupted. The “mondo” promise of revealing hidden reality is subverted; instead, the work shows that reality itself has become a low-bitrate video. Sound design oscillates between ASMR intimacy and harsh data-mosh noise, forcing the viewer into uncomfortable proximity with images that repel and attract simultaneously. But to what end