FILTH FEAR FAITH FERAL FLESH FAILURE FEVER FOREVER
2024
1:1 steel wire model of Kawasaki H2R supercharged engine, waste engine oil, 1.5” x 33.5” x 81.5” steel receptacle, and steel floor grates
Dimensions variable.

In 2014, Kawasaki announced the Ninja H2R, a track-only motorcycle designed to break the motorcycle industry’s standard top speed of 186mph, delivering a top speed of 250mph. The answer to the dreams of all the speed fanatics is an unhinged culmination of technology and engineering packed into a vehicle that fits below a man’s crotch. 

Before the invention of motorsports, the fastes speed a body could experience was 120 mph in freefall. The terminal velocity of a vertical fall, often associated with death, is now translated horizontally through motorsports, where the body can travel at speeds beyond the speed of the dive towards death, without the threat of a predestined crash after the fall. 

On a motorcycle going 250 mph on a linear track, the body travels in a perpetual state of extremis without ever reaching the fatal end. There is no destination; the drive is the objective, and the speed, bearing a readiness to go beyond the limits of life. 

The human condition subjects us to infinite desire within the constraints of finite time. Žižek clarifies that the death of the Self in eroticism does not implicit a claim to immortality. The reversal of negativity is not a new positivity. “‘Negation of negation’ means that even negation fails”; hence, “not only are we not immortal but we are even not mortal, we fail in that endeavor to disappear”(Žižek, 175). The death-drive of riding 250 mph, then, is the relentless persistence of infinite desire, propelling us beyond the boundaries of our finite existence.