Bottle 4 (2007) is a video projection featuring a glass bottle that appears to be of medical or scientific origin. A rubber tube extends from its top, emitting a swirling gas illuminated by an eerie light. This quasi-experiment takes on a sinister tone with an accompanying soundtrack, composed by Kelley himself, filled with droning tones, discordant noise, and an unsettling hum. The repetitive, relentless soundscape amplifies the bottle’s unsettling presence, transforming it into an object of both scientific fascination and existential unease.

Bottle 4 is part of Kelley’s Kandors series, which he began in 1999 and examined ‘new media of the past’, reflecting on idealized visions of the future through a retrospective lens. Kelley lifted the fictional city of Kandor, Superman’s lost hometown from DC Comics and focussed on Superman’s origin story through these works. In the comics, Kandor is stolen and miniaturized by an intergalactic villain. Superman eventually retrieves it, but the city must remain trapped in a bottle within his Fortress of Solitude, sustained by tanks of Kryptonic atmosphere, to preserve its inhabitant’s survival.

Within this context, Bottle 4 becomes a meditation on displacement, nostalgia, and the impossibility of escaping the past. Just as Superman’s bottled city embodies longing and alienation, Kelley’s work abstracts these themes into a broader reflection on cultural memory and the failures of utopianism. The swirling gas and luminous glow within the bottle evoke both scientific containment and an otherworldly presence, emphasizing a fractured relationship with time, history, and identity. Part of a twelve-year project, Kandors encapsulates Kelley’s ongoing exploration of memory, loss, and the eerie allure of a future that never arrived. Bottle 4 invites us, as terrestrial beings, to confront this dilemma in more direct and unsettling ways.