THE BASTARD FIELDS

Most Dismal Swamp

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Introduction

Nina Davies

You're listening to Future Artefacts FM , a bi-monthly podcast/broadcast featuring speculative fiction audio works by artists and writers produced and presented by Nina Davies,

Rebecca Edwards

Niamh Schmidtke

and Niamh Schmidtke, on RTM

and also available on podcast channels.

The programme focuses on fictional works intended for broadcast to carve out a better understanding of the now by exploring various interpretations of the future.

Together with guests we discuss the mechanics of different types of storytelling to reveal the complexities of contemporary culture. Let’s get started.

All

Let’s get started.

Artist Introduction

Okay, welcome back to future artefacts FM. I am your host, Nina Davies,

and I'm Rebecca Edwards

and I'm new schmidtke, and this is episode 31

Yeah

We're continuing on with the mini series we started in the last episode as a chorus, and today we're really excited to have Most Dismal Swamp here showing some audio extracts from his recent film Bastard Fields.

Welcome to the show, Dane.

Welcome, Dane.

Dane Sutherland

Hello. Thank you so much.

How are you doing today?

Wonderful.

[laughs]

Someone told us we never ask that, how are you? We were like, [robotic voice] how are you?

We just jumped straight in. We just jumped straight in.

Yes, very excited to have Dane on the show. Anyone who maybe hasn't listened to the last episode of the mini series as a chorus, we're looking at choirs and songs as forms of storytelling and collaboration, and most specifically, how does this perspective translate to artists whose collaborative process goes beyond the baseline level of working together to something more akin to developing together. You can listen to the last episode for more context, and we also have the full little curatorial statementy thing on Instagram, but I'm gonna pass over to Rebecca now.

Yeah, thank you, Niamh. So I'm just going to introduce Dane.

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.

The best bio I've ever read!

[laughs]

I was actually thinking I might need to edit that down a bit.

When you said you give long answers. I was like, Ah, I think I get it now.

So good.

So we're doing something different, slightly different for this episode, Dane's provided us with an excerpt from your work, Bastard Fields, and we're going to split up this excerpt into two parts. So not following our usual format of just playing the work and then heading into the conversation, we're going to kind of pace it with the work.

Before we go into the work, Dane, is there anything that you want to say about the overall work of Bastard Fields, or do you want to save that for the conversation later?

If you want to see the full project, it is being presented at Autotelic Foundation’s Bacon Factory space in London until mid December. But it lives online as well at the Vienna digital cultures website so you can watch it in bed anytime you want.

I would imagine that's the best way of viewing.

Absolutely, I made it in bed.

That's such a good way to make artwork. Is there anything you'd like people to know before they listen to these extracts, or is there a particular way you'd encourage people to listen if they're able to?

I do recommend headphones. Because, yeah, I recommend headphones.

I recommend headphones as well.

Before listening to this first extract, there is a section that includes the voices of two young boys and simulated violence, including a scream and the sound of a gunshot.

Okay, so we're gonna listen to the first part, and we'll see you back in around five ish minutes. Okay.

Cool. Bye.

Work: The Bastard Fields (Part 1)

Can you picture something for me, lambkin?
Can you picture something on this screen?
On the screen you see yourself. You can see all of the times you were exposed. And all of the times you felt unseen. You can see yourself rotting in a safe space; in a conventicle of kindly knowing. Your lungs are full with smoke and your eyes with blissful tears: your flesh seduced in abundant obscurity.
Your sight becomes like to a world in abundant blindness: a ghostly eye beseeched of visionary poison and recreated in this loving screen. And you will always see this screen, lambkin. This veil is all that exists.
Can you picture that for me?
Can you picture me looking back at you, lambkin?

Do you remember that feeling we once had, when all we could do was observe what we had become a part of: a poor, vibeless world with nothing but the impossibility of not playing a part in its great moodboard?

When we’d look at each other and ask to choose our own hallucination to invest in and to live in? To choose to poison ourselves with something other than stalled bitterness and unclean data?

When there was nothing but the most trifling of chances, like, it was so fucking unlikely, that not only would we find ourselves comprised of everything that was needed to sustain something and call it a life, but that this thing would be the worst variation of a scheme. Real misery, you know?

Well… it was more than that.

It was a strategic stagnation growing inside of us. Lifeless terms of servitude guiding us.

Delights impossible of description, looking back at us and saying, “you can’t change this, you can’t change your nature, this is what you are, you are a failed corpse and that is the intended audience of this world.”

…

A ghost.

Conversation

Okay. Welcome back. Hope you enjoy the first part of Bastard Fields. So just to start things off, Dane, I wanted to talk about the two narrators at the beginning of the work, and you've decided to call them the Creative Directors. I don't know whether that's actually like in the work that you would know for listeners… You might not know that these are the creative directors, but that's how you've kind of cast them.

So what kind of production are they directing? And how does this relate to your role as the sort of curator of Most Dismal Swamp. Or is there a relationship to this, to these characters?

I think, first to explain the characters. Yeah, it's a bit of a implicit thing, apart from when you read the credits and you see that they are called the Creative Directors. I don't know how important that is, other than kind of my own kind of understanding of who they were when I was kind of trying to write the role and write the characters and develop those with the actors as well.

And they ended up kind of just being these cobbled together monstrosities, and the creative director was a good central term to gather together these monstrous elements that was maybe scraping from the internet or finding in funny tweets or quotes or something. So I feel it was a lot of slightly obnoxious or entitled kind of tones and, like I say, quotes from people's tweets that I found to be quite obnoxious as well, which were just forced in there as well.

Also, the creative director being a really interesting figure to consider right now, potentially, as someone who is involved in developing or presenting a kind of body of work with multiple people. So in that sense, there's definitely a kind of relationship to what I do with Most Dismal Swamp as well.

But these specific ones, these kind of quite monstrous figures of creative directors, they're almost like an amateur kind of cult leader, or at least someone who's in this deep, kind of encrypted cult space where you can't quite make full sense of what they're saying. But maybe there is a bit of a resonance to some of the terms or phrases that they're using.

They feel very much like hype men.

Yeah, exactly. There's kind of these, like… yeah, like a kind of composite of, like, hype and hallucinatory.

I feel like they're quite coercive directors, like, the way that they're kind of like whispering and going in between, like, one ear and the other, I kind of feel like they're… trying to get in my head a bit and like, is that something that you were kind of doing purposefully?

Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, there's maybe a kind of, like, encrypted, kind of opaque rhetoric going on in what they're talking about, but maybe a somewhat more familiar logic that could be related to something familiar in the kind of mediascape that we traverse together, maybe we can know people or hear things like this and like I say, I've kind of borrowed some of the terms or phrases, but also a familiar logic that's maybe related to something like a nightmare logic as well.

Can I also ask about mediascape? Because it was also in your bio, but kind of, what's… the where are the parameters?

Yeah, I mean, I don't know about borders. I think I imagine this kind of term, mediascape, just to kind of describe maybe a kind of shared terrain or world that one navigates, sometimes alone, sometimes with others, sometimes against others, or hiding from others. But nonetheless, it's a scape or a terrain composed of the kind of interoperable media formats and platforms that we kind of each use, even just to kind of talk to each other, but all these things are mediated in some way.

So I feel like that is the kind of mediascape…

Mostly in digital spaces or also in kind of like the body?

I think, yeah, they're kind of like physical world… there's no way to untether them in a way. And I feel like one's organization online is kind of prompted in some way, or responds to offline organization or disorganization also. But like you say, the body as well, like the human kind of body and soul and mind and everything and feeling are kind of really quite deeply entangled with the media as well. And what that… how that prompts us to think and act and feel, and that's part of what Bastard Fields was getting at, as well. So that's why there's this nightmarish, confusing quality to what these creative directors are saying, or maybe a bit oppressive as well.

I think this like nightmarish thing comes through with just the sound, though, with just the voice. I mean, when, if you watch the work, it obviously has this kind of very nightmarish feel to it, where the creative directors are running through hilly fields, which has a long history with stone circles and things like that. But I'm really interested in the sort of, the vocal fry and the uptalk of these creative directors as well.

Like, I don't know if you've heard about the influencer voice, but this kind of like surge in this very particular way of speaking that's kind of like dumbed down, but it's meant to kind of lull you into, kind of being annoyed by it, but also understanding it and wanting to kind of… Yeah, It's bit ASMR and the creative directors have that influence of voice to me for sure.

Yeah. I mean, that's one of the elements that was brought into the discussions I had with the actors about how to present this like quite inherently hard to present text. I did write it for dialog, but nonetheless, I completely understood that it's not going to be easy for an actor to pick up and use so there was a bit of kind of playing around with vocal fry and how to couch these terms in a way that doesn't need to sound natural, I think, but at least it came across as sounding… or hitting certain notes that I wanted to sound. Like when Nina was Saying that like you feel a bit like oppressed or nightmare, kind of, they're getting into your head. That was kind of the aim, I suppose.

But then it's not all. It's also not like a kind of, like critique or anything, or entirely, I'm making fun of, like, the feel of creative direction, because I feel like these things are not just like abstract things. They're also people in, like, any field. Like, there's also, there's amazing people working in these fields.

But I feel like they become abstracted, right?

Yeah, I am kind of abstracting them, and kind of, I am kind of working with a kind of implicit logic, maybe that's there in the work of creative directors, or maybe in the and it's not just that. It's like, the kind of milieu that this role as part of like I've come across the phrase a “context creator” rather than a content creator recently, and I found that, again, to be a similarly quite obnoxious thing. It's like we have the media literacy or the ability somehow for rather than all these serfs or trolls,

what do you see as your role within collaboration. Can you speak about the process of gathering works? Because you're talking about this mediascape, but even… and granted, for those who haven't seen the film Bastard Fields or seen your work, more generally, there's a process in which you're gathering the works of kind of peers and those whose works you enjoy, can you talk a little bit about that process and maybe how that worked in Bastard Fields more specifically?

I mean, this is where, like, the way I work really does chime with someone like a creative director or a curator, but also researchers, educators, or, I don't know, just because I'm learning all the time with these projects, just by virtue of working with people. But then how that kind of feeds into a practice that is also becoming more and more like quite deep commitment that is corrupting the practice by proxy to these kind of like dismal realities. So it's becoming really part of the thing it's ostensibly critiquing. But then collaboration really comes into that. So like, I think what kind of like prompts the collaboration in the first place is actually total, total self indulgence.

[laughs] Because, like, I am very much, like, at the center of the production, and like, I've kind of developed the idea, like a thesis or a concept or whatever, or a thing to explore, and I bring together the research, but also I kind of bring together other artists or collaborators, and they tend to be people who maybe I see in their work, or in at least a rationale or in their work, or some latent thing in their work that could resonate, or does resonate, or even kind of complicate or confuse what I'm trying to do. And that kind of really feeds into the idea that I kind of try to nurture in these projects, which each of the collaborators are kind of part of their own world that I can maybe kind of index within this kind of artifact I'm developing.

So I'm kind of thinking of a kind of thing like the cargo cults from like Melanesia, where something like, maybe a kind of Western artifact washes up on the shore and that has no bearing within their kind of, I don't know, semiotic space or, like shared imaginary. So it's seen as a kind of like artifact of the gods or something, or it's kind of worshiped, or they try to kind of perform a ritual like an airplane landing thing, to get a plane to land again, that kind of thing. So it's a kind of outside influence that's… yeah, and that's, I see, that's kind of part of, like some of the works that's come in, like, I work with. So there's, like, the sculpture or performance, or…

I'm actually always really amazed by how many people you get on board for your projects, like reading the credits. I just think how… because it feels you feel very fluid as a curator, artist, producer, whatever you want to call Most Dismal Swamp in reality. It feels very fluid. It feels like these things, kind of you maybe meet someone, and then they come on board at a particular time, like, I don't know how you do it. I don't know how you get so many people on board to create something that's… so that feels so finished whenever, when it also feels like everything is very sporadic, that's always confused me and like made me so… why I like your practice I guess.

Teach us your ways.

This is why, like, I'm really happy to say something like self indulgence is what motivates it, because it means I can be happy while making it and like I sometimes find myself in a situation where, I mean, there comes a time where the editing happens, and there I'm kind of like surrounded by the results of these collaborations, or they're still unfolding, perhaps, and I'm kind of just like sitting at home, consuming them and getting to manipulate them and play with them. And that's kind of an incredible position to be in, but that is enabled by, I think, another a couple of things.

One maybe just being curiosity, like there's other artists I kind of want to work with, or I see a resonance or potential to work with, and I just love to have a coffee and chat and see what can happen. And sometimes that can involve, I've called it accidents before, but maybe it's more appropriate to call them like synchronicities. So when I was developing a project called Scraper, Nina was the collaborators. But it's also not a collaboration necessarily, where we're working on what your performance is together. It's very much kind of my outline or project whatever, and then you're doing your work, you're bringing stuff into that. But the synchronicity for me was that, like, you had planned to, like, have this, like, Bionic Step. Well, you did do that.

I did bionic step, but I think I did like, I was, like, really obsessed with that at the time, not that this is my interview with these, like videos on Tiktok of people trying to catch rare AIs, which meant that they, like, would use the AI anime filter and then, like, put just random objects, like household objects on their face to try and, like, get this rare AI. And I was sort of like, thinking about, yeah, and there was something about… when you told me about your idea, I was like, Oh, I think this kind of, like, this sort of like… a work that didn't have a life that I was like, sort of, I don't know where it's gonna.

When we were shooting, it felt like it didn't have a home yet, or you weren't sure about it, or something, I don't know, a bit like, it seemed to, like, immediately click with me.

That's lovely, because it means that there's no hierarchy. That's what it feels like in your work. It's not like you're the overarching god of Most Dismal Swamp. It's like… don't you call them Swamp Angels?

I had done. But like, I think, I feel like initially that was kind of not helpful in terms of crediting people properly and actually saying to the audience, this is what people actually did.

You spoke before about needing to make Bastard Fields as also thinking about sites of gathering while we're living in times of really polarizing and, like quite fascist politics. And one of the things that's coming up in this conversation for me is kind of your role as a gatherer. I mean, how do you… that process of making in terms of that process of, like, gathering work and working collaboratively, in terms of, there's a piece of an idea here…How can I bring it to this other point, together with you? And like, we both work with it separately. Why does that feel so important now?

I think one reason at the top of my head why that's important now is because of the element of, like synchronicity or accident or surprise. And I'm not saying that can't happen alone, but I think it's really accelerated, or, I don't know it happens more often with other people, as well as and I'm kind of courting it as well.

Like a reason why that's important to me is, I think this kind of logic maybe of like world building, or it's often kind of been said is that Most Dismal Swamp maybe builds a world and I think when I kind of maybe teach stuff about world building, it's when I go to work, or if I kind of read about it, it seems to kind of really foreground the significance of things resonating, or things being consistent, a world being consistent, having consistent logic or something. And I find that to be kind of not what a world is. The world is full of inconsistencies and disagreements. And some polite disagreements, or some more adversarial disagreements, and I want that to kind of exist in Most Dismal Swamp as well. Or at least, kind of represented somehow.

And sometimes those disagreements are not kind of adversarial, they're just like two things that don't even recognize each other existing, like many of the internet bubbles. They don't see each other because they're not important to each other.

I've had that with some of my scripts that I wrote with my work, where people will be like, I can't follow the conversation. I'm like, “Well, I've kind of built a world so the people are having a conversation within the world, which means that there's going to be completely random, tangential things that they start talking about, and even though you don't understand it, that's what makes it, like, believable and real”.

I think also, like, an honesty about how reality actually is, yeah, you know, it's not a direct narrative line.

Okay, should we listen to part I think let's listen to part two.

So let's get into it, and again, we'll see you on the other side.

Work: The Bastard Fields (Part 2)

There are four or five Things I have to tell you this Night, and the First is this: A bloody Sword, a bloody Sword, a bloody Sword for thee… that shall pierce the Hearts of many. In their unredeemed state these hearts thus immersed in soul and flesh, benumbed, asleep, or intoxicated by the poison of the world. A bloody sword for thee..

Secondly, Many Miles shall ye travel, and shall see nothing but Desolation, and ruinous Wastes in thee… Inside and out is a stew of hostile architecture, designed and dismal and as full of love as it is bare of change.

Thirdly, The fertilest Places, shall be as waste and desolate as the fields. And I want you to ask: What happens when what is reaped is the reaping of the mystic annihilation of souls.

Fourthly, The Women with Child shall be ript up and dashed in Pieces; though in the midst of moss… farre distant from any dwelling, she reproduce a covenanting epoch; a beggarly data poison.

Fifthly, Many a Conventicle had in thee; but ere long, we shall have a Conventicle that will make thee tremble: Many a Preaching has waired on thee; …but ere long, we shall preach to thee by splinternet and Fire, and by bloody Sword…

Conversation

RE
You just heard Alexander Peden furiously preaching there, which brings me on to the next question about Alexander Peden. So can you tell us a bit about who he is, who was he in real life, and who is he within your work? Because from my research, it seems like he was widely regarded by his followers as a prophet, and he had visions and predictions about the future. And there's a famous story that involves him praying 11 miles away from this particular event and then having a vision of this covenanter John Brown, being shot by government troops who kind of predicted this quite momentous event for that time. So, yeah, just tell us a bit about who he is.

DS
I mean, a lot of the initial research for the Bastard Fields kind of stemmed from looking into… different angles, the history of the covenanters in Scotland, a 17th Century outlawed Christian group. The king at the time had kind of outlawed this flavor of Christianity. So the covenanters kind of took to the hills of Scotland to pursue the kind of religious gatherings.

And one thing that I kind of drew from this was the the seeking of a safe space, or an ostensibly safe space, which is also in a very hostile environment, a very unforgiving environment where the hills and fields are absolutely freezing and windy and horrible, but also there's like militias actually out to kill you as well. So there's a kind of like, try to seek safety among this infrastructure, or this invisible kind of like, atmosphere of fear.

And Alexander Peden was someone who organized a lot of these field conventicles. These field conventicles were kind of these outside gatherings, and they were a terrorist act. They were illegal. So that kind of seems to resonate with the prescription of kind of otherwise peaceful organizations nowadays. So some of the kind of text, or some of the script is like taken directly from some of his preaching, but I've kind of added to or changed quite a lot of it. For the Bastard Fields, I thought was quite interesting to have this person who is organizing a kind of community outside of or in an unorthodox way, in a kind of unsafe or challenging space. And you can't tell necessarily, whether he's maybe a kind of amateur preacher in the film, or whether he's just someone who is kind of firing people up, which is also a beautiful thing, and kind of necessary these days as well, like you said, with like current state of like politics.

But also it kind of feeds into… it just reminds me of like I mean it’s like 20-25, years old now, but the very start of Sarah Ahmed's the cultural politics of emotion she brings up. I think it's like a quote from the BNP or something, just to kind of locate the emotional resonances that are in some of the kind of less obvious language they're using, and how that kind of creates an emotional response and in their supporters. And that's kind of the same with a lot of the fired up language in the script here for Alexander Peden,

RE
Yeah, he's, he's also interesting because, I mean, obviously this was an audio work, but he's very well known as someone who wears this quite horrific mask. So he's got this anonymity about him as well. Even though he was very well known at the time, and I know that you recreated that mask for the Autotelic show.

DS
Yeah, so the mask exists in the National Museum of Scotland. Obviously, we can't use it, but an artist called Ellen Dunne… I presented her with just photographs of this mask, which is… I can't remember exactly all the materials, but there was like human hair, there was wooden teeth, it had like a leathery face kind of thing. It looks a bit like, kind of 17th century, like, Slipknot mask.

RE
Totally, yeah.

DS
And she created this absolutely, like incredibly with, it's not precisely the same, but it's a really… it seems like alive this thing. And it was worn by actor John Nayagam, who performed in it so well. But, yeah, just the idea of masks came into… it allowed me to explore masks again, like in this project, as kind of maybe an avatar or an anonymity device.

RE
I also want to ask about the sort of the gathering within particular parts of the landscape. I know that Peden's Cove is named after Alexander Peden, and it's also where you filmed part of the Bastard Fields. So maybe talk us through a bit about, maybe like, where he gathered, why he was gathering in these particular places, what it meant for the people that followed him as well, to kind of go to these very remote parts of Scotland.

DS
I think it was just out of necessity in terms of finding places that were remote, difficult to find, but also had a bit of safety. So Peden’s Cove is a kind of chasm with a river, and so it's a little bit sheltered with woods, but it's also, yeah, it's outside in Scotland, it's going to be not the nicest place in the world. And yeah, there was a lot of commitment involved with traveling to these places as well, like on foot and staying hidden, staying warm, staying alive. So yeah, there's the amount of commitment involved in just like organizing and meeting together to carry on this religion.

NS
It's making me think about types of resistance as well as researching into the Women's Greenham Common, the anti-nuclear movement in the 80s, and listening to kind of women speak about being part of that. And one of the things they spoke was kind of being in these tents in the winter, you know, like and living there for a decade in tents in the winter, and thinking about also that, sort of, what's your conviction for a cause? Whether that be kind of this almost called like faith, or whether that be for something that's political. And I guess there's kind of this, this teetering as well, that we're talking about in terms of, like, the need for, let's say, a very charismatic leader, you know, and then, but what are they leading you in? And of course, with Scotland as well, this kind of part of the context is this as well as that it was an English King saying you can't practice this to Scots.

DS
So yeah, like you say, they're bound up in the commitment. There's also things like charisma and like maybe the hallucination that comes with commitment to like a world or a religion or something.

NS
And one thing I found interesting when we had our pre-show chat was you were talking about the sections that we're listening to in these extracts as songs. And we also spoke a lot about kind of the role of music in how we're listening to the work, kind of like as a way to sort of choreograph the visual elements of the film. But can you talk a bit about what the role of music is for this piece, and why? Why are you thinking of these sections as potentially song?

DS
I mean, I suppose, in some ways, quite simply, maybe they just are songs, perhaps because people are sharing existing songs. So I mean, with previous projects, I've always been really keen to work with someone and commission, like a soundtrack, a new body of music and audio and sound design. And with this, it was more of a kind of going back to, like, thinking about mixtapes or a playlist or something, and it kind of like feeds into this idea of, like a sketch show or something, especially like one, like blue jam or jam from the 90s, which was almost like a kind of weird ambient mix tape combined with, like, weird, hallucinatory kind of narratives. So obviously, I'm taking quite a lot from that.

With these specific ones, those that are in the scene with the creative directors, there's a song by Mick Harris, which really, when I was kind of, I kind of for that scene, or that kind of part of the video, I really had in my head a kind of mood or atmosphere. It was quite oppressive, or even like the kind of architectonics of feeling like you're inside an underground space. I felt like that song kind of had that quality.

And even going back to, like, a really old project that I did, like swamp protocol in 2018, or 19, where, I think, like the musician who created the music for that, Annie Nops, she created this very architectonic, spacious kind of thing. So that's just something that maybe intuitively drawn to.

Whereas with Alexander Peden scene Ange Halliwell had this, like, really beautiful harp piece. And there kind of it's a good example of why these, why I think of these things as songs, because the script that I've already written, but also how it's been presented by the actors, and how it's been recorded, or how I can edit it, along with additional sound design, has to kind of really collaborate with the music if it exists already, it has to fit somehow… so the cadence, it kind of starts off in the script, but then it's further pushed by the actor, who puts a lot of thought into it and wondering why these words are being said. But then it also gets pushed further by the music as well.

Another amazing synchronicity for me, it was that harp song was called lullaby for the dead, which is, to me, kind of perfect for the Bastard Fields as, ostensibly the main character is the CGI bog body, which might suggest, or it’s my suggestion, that we are kind of all bog bodies, like within this mediascape, we're kind of buried in this world, where we become a kind of composite of the world and our kind of flesh… we're kind of deeply, quite entangled with that.

So there's this kind of lullaby being for the dead or for a bog body, but also a lullaby being something that entrances you and enchants you and lulls you into a kind of place of kind of safety, or feeling or not feeling, or kind of not being awake, or… One of the things that kind of explore throughout the project is maybe this being lulled into either sleep or even a kind of state of anesthesia, and what that means to kind of manipulate how one feels or doesn't feel something.

ND
I think. But then the lullaby for the dead, almost is, like,

RE
It's like an oxymoron

ND
Like, what is it lulling it into? Or is it about going into, like, a deeper, yeah, about kind of, like an awakening of something?

DS
Yeah. I mean, like, and also, yeah... So going deeper, into sleep as a kind of, like maybe as a rigorous practice as well, like a lucid dreaming or something. And also, I mean, the kind of constant nesting of these fictions or scenes kind of maybe suggests a kind of, like deepening, kind of stack of hallucinations that just keep going down and down and down.

I was obviously doing a lot of research into a psychologist called James Hillman, who described almost going into a dream space as, like building a bridge, like down into this, like shared dreamscape. And he uses this term from a theologian called Henri Corban “Mundus Imaginalis”, which is a kind of shared, social kind of dream space, or kind of symbolic space, is not unreal, but it's what we all tend together as communities to kind of build a kind of shared archetype and concept or things we can talk to each other about. And again, yeah, going deeper into that, there's maybe a kind of nightmare or model collapsed Mundus Imaginalis, which was kind of… so that's why it's quite nightmarish perhaps.

ND
I'm interested in what you're saying about a sort of, like going deeper into a dreamscape as a form of model collapse. I don't know whether we've spoken about model collapse on the show before.

ding, ding, ding. New term now,

Could you kind of explain how you're thinking about model collapse, and then also, like…

DS
Yeah, I mean, I can kind of explain it from someone who's researched a bit, but not from a kind of computer scientist. So there's probably a computer scientist listening who could, like, massively correct me.

ND
I don't think we have any computer scientists followers.

DS
To me, it seems to kind of describe this phenomenon, which I find hard to not see in almost any… so mostly generative AI, but when I was looking at kind of other kind of AI output, or other AI kind of systems like agentic AI, I still feel there's some element of this inherent to the way they work. And I could be wrong, but it describes this phenomenon where an AI model is digesting and developing its embeddings through ingesting kind of synthetic data. So data that other AI’s have output, or it has output itself. So it's a kind of self cannibalizing thing. But also in just the very kind of architecture of how an output is generated, it can refer to these embeddings in the models that are built through a kind of statistical extrapolation, or what kind of or a statistical median in a graph of what these things are so. And this, to me, represents a kind of epistemicide, or kind of removing of outlier data or outlier perspectives, or identities or whatever, or at least, kind of putting them in a…. Yeah, setting them a particular way.

RE
Yeah. Because when everything is the median, when everything is the middle, there is no room for extremes, right?

DS
Yeah, I guess so, yeah. I mean, there are kind of instances where it's been suggested that platforms like Facebook actually encourage extreme behavior that happens on them, so that their models can then start to better predict those behaviors. So I think there is a kind of, yeah, this is still trying to figure out the efforts.

NS
I guess, that also goes around engagement. You know, even I'm thinking about when people are reviewing things like we spoke earlier, a little bit about where some of the scripts came, in terms of these extremes, especially Alexander Peden's voice, there's a part of it that, to me, felt like angry Reddit forums and thinking about when you're going online to write something online, in terms of in a forum space or in a review, you're usually not writing a review because you think it's really, really good. You’re usually writing a review because you're really, really angry, or you have some kind of slightly spicy take that you think someone else would enjoy to read.

Like I was talking with a friend yesterday about letterbox and how they wrote this comment about the film blitz being really, really bad. They were really angry at it, and it became this really liked comment, because it was just kind of this hot take about what it was. But I think that Alexander Peden's voice in this has that feeling as well, of sort of an AI trying to figure out… it's like, okay, so what are, what is like the extreme voice, or what is the voice that feels charismatic, and that might be the thing that sort of liked the most. You know, it's like, it's voted up in a in a social media stream or something, which would be the one that is oftentimes the most negative.

DS
I think, I think that habit of like takes and spicy takes and platinum takes that you're describing really feeds into or has something to say about this idea of gathering that you've brought up already, which is, like, to me, this kind the necessity for a hot take, but also the effectiveness of a hot take, to gather so much likes and traction, is really based on this kind of maybe trying to have a super impactful individual position on something rather than a contribution to something, which maybe involves more than one person, that involves multiple people working together, I don't know, but maybe that's a bit unfair and a bit black and white, but it does seem there's two potentially different logics there.

ND
It's kind of making me think. I can't remember if I've already spoken about it on the show. But I remember, like, a few years ago, I was reading this book called can the left learn to meme. And there was a part where they were talking about Stranger Things, which is a super hot topic right now. In season two, where Mike comes back, I can't remember the name of the character, like one of the one of the kids comes back from the inside out world, and he's experiencing these sort of, not necessarily hallucinations, but like, like, trauma PTSD, of the inside out world. And his mom realizes that it's not actually PTSD. He's actually experiencing these things and she's like, can you tell me, like, more about what you're actually experiencing and he can't explain it, so he draws it, and he draws it on loads of little A4 sheets of paper. And at first, the mom's like, what are these scribbles? And then she kind of puts them together and realizes that actually it creates like a map to the inside world.

And in this book, they're kind of talking about like that as a form of like… So I'm kind of coming back to maybe like, I'm sort of coming back to like, maybe how you work as like, Most Dismal Swamp. But the book is talking about kind of getting rid of the genius artist and that, like, if we look at these individual scribbles as each person kind of joining in the meme, like joining in the meme and making their own thing, each meme on its own doesn't necessarily communicate much, but if you kind of put all of these things together, it starts to give an idea of what's happening. He's sort of kind of trying to move towards being like, that's how art should be created now, or is being created now.

DS
I mean, that's really, that's amazing to hear, actually, because I think I really do resonate with that as a kind of approach that I kind of do like, especially with that moment of the mum seeing the drawings and being like what is this? Because it's kind of like, almost like seeing elements of like the Bastard Fields or something, just kind of that moment of being repelled, but also intrigued, but also those things being an index of someone's like hallucination or weird supernatural experience. Like, I haven't only seen the first series of Stranger Things, but from that…

ND
I’ll find the clip, I'll send it to you, I'll find the excerpt of the book, and I'll send it… I think it really, I can't believe I hadn't thought about making that link, but it was sort of like, about, kind of like having to put in that work of putting these kind of clues together, which in a way, I sort of feel like is something that you were doing.

DS
Well, I've always felt that, I don't know how effective this is, but I've always liked pursuing the possibility that someone watching it might be kind of forcing them to be a bit of a kind of like, well… to go back into that subject position that we all have in this mediascape, which is being like problem solvers in a way, even when it comes to like advertising or even an album release. So like, remember, like, 10 years ago when Oneohtrix Point Never released garden of delete, there was just like this transmedia campaign, which involved, like fake kids bands and fake interviews and like, a little backstory. So you're like, as a fan, you're kind of piecing together these things, and that can be an enjoyable thing to do the extra work. And even though, if that's just, like, a bit of a confusing thing to do, it's a bit of a rabbit hole.

ND
I’m thinking about also about Swifties. I'm not a Swifty, like, I don't know anything about it, but I just know that there's the whole lore behind her, like all of her body of work, and people have been like, piecing these things together. I don't know anything about what she's saying within her music, but…

DS
But it's also asking people to, like, again, invoking something that we are all using without maybe recognizing, which is just pattern recognition. Again, that's how.. it's how we kind of maybe navigate, but it's also how we… well, it's also how we kind of manage to just live our lives without kind of going crazy from all the data that's going into our senses. We kind of need that, in a way.

DS
But do you recognize patterns in your own work?

DS
Oh, yeah.

RE
Would you say, like, if you were to look at your whole body of work, what would be one of the patterns that you'd recognise?

DS
Well, it's funny you say that actually, because I think one of the things I've been doing recently is actually having time to look back on the last few years of work, and the artist and theorist, like Simon O'Sullivan, he often speaks about his work or someone's work, speaking back to them. And I think that is maybe just one way of saying, perhaps, like reflecting on your work. And when I do that, it seems to be somewhat autonomously, kind of saying something that I hadn't really put into it from the outset. But it's kind of all these ingredients are bubbling together and starting to form things like..

So one of these patterns or things that come up might be a concept that is being engineered or fictioned by the work. Like something I've been talking about is this idea of, like, folkless lore, which is like a fun, silly concept. But the more I think about it, it seems to kind of resonate with actual things that it can describe in the world.

ND
I think there's something also kind of interested in like pattern… kind of pattern recognition as a human practice, but also as a form of, like mimicry of these kind of algorithms or networks that are now, like, I would say, just completely, that completely surround us.

RE
But I want to flip that to be like, are we becoming more machine readable now? So like thinking about the way that the world works. So instead of us recognizing patterns, the machines are actually recognizing patterns in us, and we're changing our behavior to be more machine readable.

DS
Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, I think I presume that maybe pattern recognition has been with us for a long, long time. It's allowed us to kind of scaffold different ways of thinking and evolve and whatnot, and for a long, long time I guess. But maybe it’s practice or a kind of habit or ability like pattern recognition isn't just a single described thing, but rather a spectrum of practices. And maybe we're kind of getting to a point now where this kind of neural media culture or mediascape or whatever is kind of nurturing a kind of quite decadent practice of pattern recognition, maybe where it's become a decadent logic. Maybe it's really ingrained in things to the point where, as you say, that being machine readable, so we're becoming more pattern like, if we don't behave as patterns, as these embeddings, then we aren't seen.

ND
I like this idea of like looking for patterns where patterns might also might not exist. Like this kind of obsession of being like everything must be a pattern. Also going back to what you were saying about, like, to build a world, it has to kind of not make sense, like match up. And there's sort of this, like, need or desire for everything to kind of like…

DS
A formal thing, the relationship between patterns and chaos is really interesting, which is kind of what you're getting at as well. That reminds me of like when we're talking about music and the impact that has. It's also just a much more broader influence for me, I always look to music as an interesting influence or inspiration, even something like death metal, which is like very chaotic and like swirling cacophony, but also extremely technically, like pattern based as well, whether it's kind of polyrhythms or even just like in crazy guitar riffs, it's all kind of very measured and extremely talented stuff as well.

NS
It's also making me think about, then, the role of the outlier, like, in terms of, like, pattern recognition. My mum was doing Data Analytics course, which involved a lot of, like, statistical representation. And so it was talking about, like the median and the mean and so forth. It was talking about, kind of the role of the outlier, and how oftentimes the outliers almost become like a separate… now, I may be incorrectly paraphrasing her here, but like, the outliers become like a separate data set, right? So then there's a part of when we're talking about pattern recognition and kind of moving like the pattern as well, then what happens to the outlier? And I guess, coming like, out of mediascape and into, like the body, it's like, okay, so then which bodies - which potentially goes to kind of the representation of accents in the work - like which bodies, which voices are the median or the mean, which are the outlier like, depending on certain like context or culture or so forth.

DS
I mean these. I think maybe a lot of these kind of outlier fields or data sets, or sometimes they're not data sets, because it means an artist like Mimi Onuoha has a project called a library of missing data sets, where it's these kind of data sets that just don't exist. They're kind of… through routine data aggregation, they're kind of just either not seen or they're ignored. So she has data sets of, say, I don't know people in prison impacted by a housing crisis, or, kind of like, I don't know trans violence or something like that. And it's like, yeah, just missing from the actual data set in the first place. So yeah, in that sense, they're outliers.

But another thing I think is maybe that these outliers are super valuable as well for like I've mentioned, like Facebook, perhaps, well I read in a book by Eyal Weisman and Matthew Fuller, they were talking about platforms such as Facebook encouraging extremist behavior, encouraging outlier behavior, so that it can perfect their machine reading models, and that can kind of be apparent to me in kind of other projects, even kind of, maybe relational aesthetics/community art projects, where a lot of kind of outside or others are kind of valued for what they can bring to a work or institution. Whether that's like, I don't know, Some kind of community that an artist kind of Airdrops into to kind of engage with, or whether it's creating a data set of like choral singers throughout the UK, which are kind of regional singers, kind of queer choirs. And those identities are really important to exonerate the deregionalized output of those models.

NS
Yeah, when you say… because I think there's something interesting about, like, the specifics of that group that is othered in then when they're taken out of context, right? So what do you when you say de regionalised, what you mean?

DS
I think the regional kind of qualities of something that is being, say, like ingested or harvested or leveraged in some way, that's a value, that's a social capital that you can't kind of fake. Apple, for instance, in the early 2000s with Sherlock products. So they would kind of utilize the kind of products developed by indie developers, because they had a certain social capital that they couldn't deliver or just invent. And I think that's when I say deregionalized, I think that's kind of what the process of say something like an AI model does, it kind of deregionalizes those things and creates the more generic median, kind of statistical extrapolation of these specificities. So the specificities are still in the output, but they're more of a kind of like, yeah, a mulch.

ND
I think sadly, we're gonna have to stop there, because we've run a bit over but we could have just kept talking. I feel like we were just, I felt like we were just starting to, just getting into a new conversation, but maybe we'll just have to have you back on the show.

DS
I really, really, really appreciate, like, the questions and your guys thought, thank you.

ND
This comes up just before Christmas.

RE
Great. Happy Chris… happy holidays.

NS
Happy Hanukkah, Winter Solstice.

RE
and we'll see you in 2026!

ND
Bye!

All
Bye.

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