This is the story of the transformation of the left…..

A future beyond reach, a world that we live in and cannot grasp. Our estrangement from time and agency is painfully underscored in today’s crises of post truth politics and climate change catastrophe. But what if the “noise” we detect is actually just complex patterns, a schema that underlies all action and is yet to be discovered? What if… we could understand reality?

Map of the Bomb is a noir adventure of the discovery of such a diagram and its impact on the future.  Unlike the traditional characterization of the female in noir standards, here a female protagonist lives throughout time. She is spoilt, vampiric and all-knowing, but life isn’t so easy. She is corrupted by the resistance of the world that seems to render the impossibility of implementing actual material change. Compelled by enduring ambitions of social unity, she gets together with an empiricist hard liner, someone equally estranged in the world but nevertheless who can “handle a gun”. This awkward duo no longer protest, or work at the barricades. Instead they begin to solve a different kind of crime… they develop a sound, a new code that can alter the future from the inside out. 

But they are not unique, they are doubled by two other characters: the same score is played at the same time. Two parallel realities appear across simultaneously unfolding worlds, engendering a new kind of dissonance. Can these worlds that are aligned in time, also align in space?

This work was commissioned by Fieldwork Marfa. It was shot in Beirut, Lebanon, Marfa, Texas, and Los Angeles, USA. It is based on the story of the invention of spread spectrum frequency hopping by Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil.