Video: Joel Ducrot Takes No Prisoners

Daily life in the modern world is a blur, a miasma of meaningless motions and perfunctory routines. Like this, tag that. Add an emoticon to express your deepest emotions. Tens of thousands of years into the evolution of our species, and we’ve reduced ourselves to a never-ending stream of social-media drivel. Emasculated, stripped bare of our evolutionary honor. We have come this far, for what?

It’s time to swipe left on the postmodern smokescreen. Spike the smartphone into the dirt and grind it into oblivion. Reach deep into oneself and embrace the primal instincts, the drive to survive, the unbridled, ancestral DNA. The chaos is the order. And the order is the chaos.


Life is now nothing but existence and the elements: a constant duel with gravity, with inertia. A never-ending, primordial scream. Nothing matters. Except for speed.

The bipedal primate, one foot on pedal, the cracking of its neck thundering through the stillness. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, explode. Mash the cranks with a ferocity, muscle against metal, neither giving in, each working in tandem to produce sheer velocity. To create pure, wanton speed.

Now, finally, life is peeled back to the essentials—to the arbitrary spot on the horizon, almost instantly replaced with another random focal point. Control is an illusion, but an illusion that belongs only to its master: To two bloodshot eyes staring down a tunnel of tracers, a kaleidoscope of colors at the periphery. Trees, branches, leaves, all nothing but side ornaments in a New World Order of acceleration and agility.

The dirt is there to be moved, to be roosted in a reckless duet of savagery and style. Every rock, every bump, only exists for its own utility: For its temporary usefulness in propelling the master to its immediate destiny, a place where time and history are winnowed down to only the present, to the mere seconds that matter most.


The universe is narrow, an inverted black hole in which these fleeting seconds expand into a lifetime of possibility. Each tear-filled blink becomes an epoch in a new era of urgency, a new dawn in which two legs and two wheels determine their own fate. This is the Age of Speed, where reason and rationality are left in the smoldering scrapheap of petty human constructs. This is the place where gravity is held to Ransom.


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Photos: Steve Shannon
Edit: Scrap Creative
Text: Brice Minnigh