Alan Warburton

Soft Crash is a visual meditation on the financial collapse of 2008 and the subsequent public bank bailouts, austerity economics and recent trend towards nationalist isolationism. It's a visual rendering of a neoliberalist endgame, where wealth and power are trapped in a closed system for the 1%.

The concept was inspired by an unusual card game the artist played in 2004: at the point where one player should have won, the few remaining cards kept circulating endlessly in limited permutations. Unexpectedly, the game had reached a deadlock where no player could win. It was only after many rounds of play that the players realised something was wrong: one card was missing from the deck. This missing part had created the conditions for a kind of structural stability. No player could win, yet no player could lose so long as they continued circulating the cards. The free market of the game had become a cartel, a system of limited liability and risk based on collusion. Or an oligopoly, the stability of which curiously depended on a fundamental absence at the centre of the game.

Soft Crash speculates on the nature of that missing card. Is it the gold standard? The social contract? Or the 99%.

United Kingdom