Jacky Connolly’s Computer-Generated Doom

Something terrible is happening in Jacky Connolly’s new CGI video, Descent into Hell (2022). A house burns down, people on the street drop to the ground en masse, and an airplane nosedives into a mountain, twirling in slow motion. The reason for this chaos is never named; doom permeates the sparse narrative.
The four-channel, thirty-minute work—which will premiere next week in the Whitney Biennial—is, the artist explained via Zoom, a reaction to the events of 2020: the isolatio