Chernobyl, Cono d’Ombra II
Using today's images to speak about a dystopian future
Music
Chernobyl – Cono d’Ombra II, the second album from Cronofillers, was released in 2017. We curated the CD packaging, online communication and merchandising.
The CD is a sci-fi concept album that narrates a dystopian future: the titular Chernobyl is not the nuclear power plant, but a hypothetical city that inherited its name. The present is the past, depicted with distorted images that highlight the most grotesque elements of our actual present, pop culture in particular. This all mixed with the problems of contemporary metropolises.
Chernobyl is also a website: an interactive collage composed of video clips, fragments of lyrics and screenshots from Google Street View that serve as part of the collage. We used Photoshop to recreate the warped images for the website, but the images used in the CD booklet were created by the Google Street View imaging software itself. In the images of Aleppo, for example, the soldiers on the picket line have been digitally ‘muted’, increasing the impact of the image. The Google Street View image of the Chernobyl reactor reinforces the link to the nuclear power plant tragedy.