Everyday Ledger

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  Film Still

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  Film Still

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  Film Still

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  Film Still

Everyday Ledger is a surreal, absurdist film and visual installation exploring the hidden economies of modern warfare — how destruction is financed, normalized, and folded quietly into the rituals of daily life. The project began from a simple idea: that a missile is something everyone buys, but almost no one ever sees. We pay for them through taxes, through industry, through silence — yet they remain invisible, orbiting above us like unacknowledged ghosts.

I was inspired by the aesthetics of still life painting, vaporwave consumerism, and the banality of modern economics — imagining what it would look like if the true costs of war appeared in our kitchens, laundromats, and supermarkets. A pale pink missile and a teal bag of cash became recurring icons, placed among ordinary people in absurd professions. Together they form a cinematic loop — part critique, part confession — of a system that turns ethics into accounting.

In developing the project, I learned how difficult it is to visualize something intentionally hidden: the flow of money, the quiet machinery of militarization, the distance between cause and effect. I built Everyday Ledger as a series of vignettes, each a photographic and filmic still life, using the language of advertisement and domestic life to expose the invisible networks behind global warfare — much like how space debris tracking and anti-missile weapon tests make the unseen visible, turning orbiting absence into measurable light.

The greatest challenge was maintaining subtlety — allowing absurd comedy and visual irony to carry a heavy subject without collapsing into moralism. The project sits between beauty and discomfort, inviting viewers to laugh first, and only afterward realize that the joke is an inventory — one we all helped to write.

Built With

• openart
• saga