For seven centuries, Dante’s Divine Comedy has provided Western culture with its most durable architecture of moral ascent—a vertical passage from damnation through purgation to paradise. What interested me was not the theological content but the structural persistence: that same ascending architecture organizes Hollywood cinema with remarkable consistency, from burning cityscapes to celestial transcendence, across genres, decades, and budgets. Civilization (2008) investigates that persistence—examining how the film industry has colonized a medieval cosmological framework and made it the default grammar for depicting transformation.

I organized approximately 500 looping sequences extracted from Hollywood films into a continuous vertical scroll across six stations—Hell, Lower Purgatory, Middle Purgatory, Upper Purgatory, Heaven, and the loop point where the highest and lowest registers converge. The structure maps a moral geography that Hollywood reproduces with striking uniformity: disaster films and biblical epics, action cinema and redemption narratives all populate the same visual registers. Originally commissioned for the elevators at The Standard Hotel in New York—and now held in the collections of MoMA, the Guggenheim, and SFMOMA—the installation exploits architectural movement as argument. The imagery descends as the elevator ascends, inverting physical passage against thematic direction: the rider’s body rises while the visual field falls toward damnation. Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring provides the score, its ritualistic repetition mirroring the cyclical grammar the work exposes.

I did not use the Dante structure as literary allusion. It operates as an archaeological cross-section of the film industry’s inherited cosmology—organizing hundreds of extracted sequences according to Inferno and Paradiso logic to expose how Hollywood already deploys that logic unconsciously. The same ascending bodies, the same burning landscapes, the same clouded heavens recur across apparently distinct narratives. Individual films disguise this repetition through character and plot. Stripped of those elements and reorganized vertically, the repetition becomes unmistakable. What Guy Debord described as the spectacle—social relationships mediated by images, capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image—reveals itself here as cosmological architecture repurposed for industrial-scale mythmaking.

I populated the work with deliberately too much imagery to absorb in a single viewing. This was not decorative excess. I wanted the density itself to enact what I was examining: the condition of visual saturation in which individual images lose their singularity and only systematic patterns remain legible. There is a tension I chose not to resolve: a work that exposes saturation necessarily participates in it, aestheticizing the very overload it diagnoses. But that contradiction is productive—the viewer’s overwhelm is both the subject and the evidence. In 2008, this saturation was something I had to construct deliberately, assembling it by hand from a finite archive of theatrical releases.

Today that construction is unnecessary. Algorithmic recommendation systems and generative AI have made the archive effectively boundless, training on Hollywood’s accumulated imagery to generate new images that perpetuate the same ascending grammar without human intention. The vertical cosmology I excavated manually now reproduces itself autonomously. Streaming platforms deliver an endless scroll of transformation narratives whose visual vocabulary remains as narrow as what 500 sequences exposed sixteen years ago. The Dante structure persists—not because artists choose it, but because the apparatus has internalized it. Civilization identified a pattern that has since become a condition.

Marco Brambilla