The Mad Man’s Laughter by Alaa Mansour

The Mad Man’s Laughter (2021) engages with the simulacrum of the so-called global war on terror, and the worlds of ubiquitous surveillance and simulations it has since spawned. By exploring the fictitious entities that are at play in the military-entertainment complex, the video embarks on a journey across artefacts and precepts shaped by modalities of power and control. Through the use of archival material and computer-generated imagery, sounds, and texts, we navigate both latent and visible spaces of violence carved by colonial-militaristic image production and the data used to generate algorithmic biases. The project was developed in conversation with Edwin Nasr.



The Mad Man’s Laughter was produced for TBA21’s “st_age” in collaboration with Ashkal Alwan.