Using the figure of the digital ruin in a game-like environment, the artists show the glitches and hollowness behind and between the sequential images. The artists, in between the striking beauty of the images and sound, show the viewer how photographs no longer count as documentation of the past but are an overpowering part of everyday reality, something to touch and interact with, but also something fluid, like water, mirroring something like a reality that we never seem to be able to grasp, to penetrate or hold on to.

The film ‘All, or Nothing at All’ starts with an aerial view of Viborg, Denmark, one of the oldest Viking settlements that grew into a medieval city. Viborg looks like an idyllic city, with brick buildings surrounded by water and redtiled roofs. This soon falls apart into an uncanny, post-apocalyptic diorama in which the urban landscape has been shredded. Seven avatars sing and dance the viewer through the abandoned shopping streets, garages, the old crusader paths and centuries old alleys of Viborg while they sing ‘All, or Nothing at All’, originally sung by Frank Sinatra and re-interpreted by Danish singer Nina Vadshølt. Composed by Arthur Altman and Jack Lawrence in 1939, ‘All, or Nothing at All’ became Frank Sinatra’s first hitsong in the same year. While Sinatra interpreted it from an utterly male perspective, Nina Vadshølt transformed the song into an angelic, rebellious chant in which many voices converge and dispute each other.

The choreography is based on the musical West Side Story (1961), the adaptation of Romeo and Juliet set in New York, in which Polish/American and Puerto Rican street gangs fight each other. This choreography was performed in the flesh by dancer Daniel Cilea, motion-captured and then grafted onto the avatar-singers. As everything that seems feasible that appears on our screens, the ancient town of Viborg appears as a phantom vision. It is a polarized world in which there is no middle ground; it is everything or nothing.