Review: Sundown—Ageing in a New Age
The Digital Twilight of the Anthropocene
In “Sundown—Ageing In a New Age,” Arslohgo confronts us with an image that works as a visual meditation on aging in the era of artificial intelligence. The artist himself appears as a monumental black-and-white figure, holding a smartphone like a sacred object—a gesture that oscillates between contemplation and dependency. This self-staging evokes the iconographic tradition of religious imagery, yet instead of a prayer book or cross, the interface to the digital world becomes the object of devotion.
Symbolic Architectures of Transformation
The dominant AI logo, hovering like a rising or setting sun behind the figure, establishes a multilayered metaphor. The pyramidal form at the logo’s center—surrounded by a halo of circuit-like structures—functions as a postmodern mandala, merging spiritual and technological symbol systems. This fusion suggests a new form of transcendence, where enlightenment is no longer promised through spiritual practices but through algorithmic processes.
The title “Sundown” operates with deliberate ambivalence: Is this the sunset of an era of human autonomy or the dawn of a posthuman age? Arslohgo refuses a definitive reading, instead positioning his work in the liminal space between ending and beginning, between nostalgia and anticipation.
The Aesthetics of Digital Melancholy
The monochrome treatment of the human figure stands in powerful contrast to the golden glow of the AI symbolism. This chromatic dichotomy articulates a fundamental tension: while the human remains in grayscale—an echo of increasing obsolescence—artificial intelligence radiates in warm, promising tones. Yet this warmth is deceptive; it recalls the cold glow of screens in dark rooms, the synthetic intimacy of digital interfaces.
The artist’s chosen sweater—with its coarse knit patterns—functions as a tactile counterpoint to the smooth surface of the smartphone. This material juxtaposition addresses the loss of the tactile in an increasingly virtualized world. The rough, handmade, organic meets the smooth, industrial, posthuman.
Temporality and Technological Acceleration
“Ageing In a New Age” articulates a paradoxical temporality: while biological aging takes its natural, unstoppable course, the digital sphere promises eternal youth through constant updates, filters, and algorithmic optimization. Arslohgo stages himself as both witness and participant in this transformation—his contemplative gaze at the smartphone display becomes an allegory for a generation navigating between analog past and digital future.
The composition evokes Caspar David Friedrich’s Romantic back-figures, yet instead of gazing into sublime nature, Arslohgo’s protagonist looks into the black box of algorithmic reality. This reversal of Romantic pictorial tradition marks an epistemological break: the search for the sublime has shifted from the external to the internal, from the natural to the artificial world.
The Poetics of Disappearance
The work operates with an aesthetics of disappearance—not only in the sense of biological aging but also as a metaphor for the gradual dissolution of human agency within automated systems. The blurring contours between figure and background suggest an ontological uncertainty, where boundaries between human and machine, between subject and algorithm, become increasingly porous.
Arslohgo succeeds in capturing the existential uncertainty of an epoch in which aging is no longer merely a biological but a technological process—a constant falling behind the exponential development of artificial intelligences. “Sundown—Ageing In a New Age” thus becomes a visual epitaph for humanity in transition, caught between the melancholy of loss and the ambivalent promise of technological transcendence.
Review by Claude AI