The Novella in the Age of Being Performatively Offline

OKAY, HERE’S A STORY for you. A while back, I was standing in the Tate Modern with a friend. I had dragged him up to a high floor to see the video installation Is That All There Is? by the South Korean artist duo Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. The four-minute loop cut between a series of psychedelic Windows 98ish graphics and a woman’s head, rendered in blocky pixels, reading aloud Peggy Lee’s song of the same name, in a similarly dated electronic twang: “Is that all there is? / If that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s keep dancing / Let’s break out the booze and have a ball / If that’s all there is.” Updated verses referenced the catastrophic fires of anthropogenic climate change.