500 Apocalypses is a digital memorial comprised of five hundred curated entries from the Encyclopedia Apocalyptica.
Each entry of the Encyclopedia Apocalyptica contains a brief narrative fragment, devoid of context. The perspective, tone, and general character of these fragments differ from entry to entry. Many are small flashes of experience, recorded from a first-person perspective. Some appear to be dialogues between two or more speakers. Some are broader considerations of entire civilizations. Others are less easily categorized, however, including millions that appear to us as gibberish. Generally speaking, the entries do not run longer than five hundred words; many are only one or two lines long. At the individual level, the entries often appear to have nothing to do with one another.Taken as a larger dataset, the common thread running through entries of the Encyclopedia Apocalyptica is clear: each is a window into the collapse of a unique extraterrestrial society on a distant planet. Some capture moments that appear to precede the end of a civilization; some capture the moment of collapse itself; some capture moments from the chaotic time following the event that triggers the destruction of a people.
(self-description within the work)
