THE BASTARD FIELDS
Most Dismal Swamp
What conditions do we gather in? Can this exist without hierarchy, or even a physical space?
Most Dismal Swamp joins the second episode of our mini series ‘as a chorus’, sharing audio extracts from the recent film, The Bastard Fields. A mixtape of 3 sketches, each audio builds on the language of historical preachers, reddit forums and social media commentary. They weave a world which asks about the violence or nightmares that instills our need to come together.
With Most Dismal Swamp, we discuss the mechanics of making shared spaces, how an art practice can parody this by collaging the works of multiple authors into longer ‘playlists’ that become complex and inconsistent worlds (such as the ones we all live through), and a self-cannibalising process built on pattern recognition, outliers in data sets, and the impact of regional specificities in AI models.
We ask how art practices traverse creative production, curation and production to open up space outside of traditional systems and build artistic community both within and around the works being shown.
Bio:
Most Dismal Swamp is a mixed-reality biome; a place and a practice where a dank miasma of fictions, artists, model worlds, adversarial realisms, external hard drives, camera-tracking data, campfires, opaque rituals, game engines, amateur heresies, visual effects plug-ins, and other animals come together.
Emerging from the curation, artwork, and research of Dane Sutherland, Most Dismal Swamp’s multimedia projects involve collaboration and convivial speculation with many other artists. These projects are modular and densely populated, presented across various immersive and bespoke installations and online; Multi-User Shared Hallucinations dredged from the slumgullion swamp of adversarial digital, platform, and neural media.
A rigorous ‘acid pessimism’ inspirits the work of Most Dismal Swamp: an acerbic yet playful immersion into the composite hallucinatory lifeworlds, gamespaces, and protocols that make up the hostile architecture of our shared platform-mediated crises.
You can read the full transcript of this episode here