Interactivity without Control: David OReilly’s Everything (2017) and the Representation of Totality

The contemporary form of David OReilly’s Everything (2017) belies its engagement with the past – specifically, with the origins of both ecological consciousness and our globalized informatic economy in the visual culture and systems thinking of the late 1960s. The work’s central formal device is the mode of scalar visualization popularized within the Eames’s iconic Powers of Ten (1977). That film placed Man at the literal and metaphorical center of its universe, obviating both non-human life and ecological relationality to do so. By contrast, OReilly’s world solicits our identification with literally ‘everything’ – living and non-living, from the cosmically large to the microscopically small – except the human. A soundtrack featuring the late Buddhist philosopher Alan Watts reinforces its vision of total relationality.