The installation Forty Years of Boredom 1968-2008 consists of three works by Van Gerven Oei and Staal and a movie by the French filmmaker and theorist Guy Debord.

Against Irony (2008)
Pamphlet entitled Against Irony, laser engraved on four fine-grained Belgian hardstone plates. Against Irony proclaims the resistance against the use of irony in both artistic and theoretic approaches. Van Gerven Oei and Staal equal the use of irony with the 'lack of will' to attack a certain thematics, a certain symbolic order head on. Instead, irony provides for safe observations, without any essential insight: without any essential position that one can be held accountable for.

Citations (2008)
Two recorded texts on headphones. 1. Natural Selector's Manifesto (2007) by Pekka-Eric Auvinen (1989-2007); 2. JC-001-026343/4 (1999) by Eric Harris (1981-1999). In Citations the retorics of high school schooters is appropriated by the artists in relation to their own film pamphlet Follow Us or Die (2008). Van Gerven Oei and Staal provide a direct relation between their resistance and the resistance claimed by the high school shooters, which they analyze as 'a search for an impossible way out'.

Guy Debord: Réfutation de tous les jugements, tant élogieux qu'hostiles, qui ont été jusqu'ici portés sur le film 'La société du spectacle' (1975)
Film pamphlet by Guy Debord (1931-1994) commenting on the reaction to his earlier movie La société du spectacle (The Society of the Spectacle, 1973). In his movie, Debord nails down the inherent impossibility of the spectator's position towards his La société du spectacle. He ruptures the ideal of 'fake' commitment of the spectator: only the impossibility to fully grasp the meaning, the impossibility to be really 'committed' is the bond between maker and spectator.

Follow Us or Die (2008)
The film pamphlet Follow Us or Die (2008) extends Debord's notion of the society of the spectacle. Van Gerven Oei and Staal develop the the concept of 'digitalization of the society', which aims to analyze a tendency in the extension of the spectacular society, which they claim still holds a certain 'innocence' as a recognizable product/excess of western society subsuming a complex of concepts such as the entertainment industry, the place of mediation, the role of the spectator etc. The concept of the digitalization of society is based on the 'Second Life' principle: life, existence, in a world that in no way is connected to the physical, obstructive body of the individual human that we have had to deal with up to now. The physical body in the digitalized society is replaced with the 'ego', that can perform any possible act, any transgression it wishes, contrary to physical life that is constrained by clear borders. Van Gerven Oei and Staal analyze the 'multimedia manifestos' left behind by high school shooters such as Cho Seung-Hui (1984-2007) and the diary material of Eric Harris (1981-1999) and Dylan Klebold (1981-1999) as a last resistance against the development of western society towards a digital mediacracy. In their movie pamphlet they draw parallels between their own position as artists and the high school shooters, as a new resistance.