Melting State is a video installation on three screens where the buildings of Statens Kunstfond, Det Kongelige Kunstakademi, and Kulturministeriet are subjected to computer-generated physics simulations. The monumental buildings are inflated like weightless balloons, melt like butter on a hot pan, and are covered with soft multicoloured hair.

The work asks how we can imagine a future after the welfare state, now that it seems to be definitively being dismantled. The project questions the assumption that it is "easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the welfare state" (paraphrasing Slavoj Žižek).

From advertising screens on buses to personal mobile phones, we are daily surrounded by lifelike computer-generated representations of physical phenomena. Much of what presents itself as representations of reality are computer-created simulations. Especially simulations of destruction are so widespread and credible that one quickly forgets what the original physical phenomena looked like.

The installation was produced specifically for Interdimensionale II at Gammelgaard (September 2020) using three 4K video players (Raspberry Pi 4), three IIYAMA B2888UHSU screens, and video rendering services from foxrenderfarm.com. The work explores how repeated exposure to images of buildings sinking into rubble with glass shards and dust spreading symmetrically creates expectations that the physical world behaves the same way.

Caught between constant computer-generated simulations of destruction and status quo institutions, it becomes difficult to imagine that the welfare state can be replaced by something different and better. The work proposes a less apocalyptic demise where representative buildings don't explode and crash into computer-generated rubble, but instead lose their weight, melt, or are covered with colourful hair.

The project imagines a future where columns echoing ancient Greek wooden architecture lose their weight or melt, where gravity is suspended for a moment while art institutions deform and dance in the wind before the air goes out of them. The work uses the fictional realism we all know from computer simulations to create images of something that impossibly could exist, but becomes credible enough that we might imagine an alternative to widespread cool misanthropic ideas about life after the welfare state's demise.