The original UN-DEAD-LINK, presented at Basel’s plug.in gallery in 2008, was a work that connected a 3-D game world with objects in the real world: whenever a character died inside the 3-D shooter game, notes would go off on a grand piano. The artists experienced a blackout in Tokyo caused by a Self-Defense Force jet that had crashed; later, during the Iraq War, they drew a connection between that experience and the US air raids in Iraq, and created a work addressing these grim times in which human deaths have come to feel less real.
The newly updated UN-DEAD-LINK 2020 finds its seeds in the current coronavirus crisis, in which many are becoming numb to the reality of death, despite the media’s daily reports of cases and casualties.