Dismal Sessions 001 - 021

Body Drift: Did I Disappoint You?
(50:15)

@body_drift

Body Drift: Did I Disappoint You?
(50:15)

@body_drift

Never Worse: set 23.11.2019

https://soundcloud.com/never_worse

Terence Sharpe: WHAT LUXURY IT WOULD BE TO DESCRIBE THIS RACE AS CEDED
(04:42)

WHAT LUXURY IT WOULD BE TO DESCRIBE THIS RACE AS CEDED is a visual companion to the polemic essay 'A Ceded Interfile: Future-oriented Social and Cognitive Design' published through The New Centre for Research and Practice’s &&& platform in July 2019.

The video is a non-linear redux of the idea that two separate trajectories of man and machine is a false correlation rooted in bad humanism. The essay takes the field of Kansei or Affective Engineering as an example of a mechanism that sees the nature of man and machine as a kind of ouroboros to be - the collection of data is an open dragnet across the sea of content nature produces, but its manipulation and use on humans within their ecosystem requires a system of codification and divisive application – one that hasn’t been created yet, but one that companies like Cambridge Analytica have been able to convince people exists via a narrative engineered towards those blinded by banal pathologies of their own relevance. The video backdrop to these considerations is a quick and dirty assemblage of user generated content, both personal and salvaged, realising through rough aesthetics that the screen-based existence that has flattened the dynamics of the everyday and the enchanting, leaves a lot to be desired from our tale end whatever epoch we are currently passing through. This collection of work is complimented by the release of FEIGNED HEARING (2020) - the first iteration in a three-part series of electroacoustic compositions, drawing from live recordings, foley sound and synthesis. FEIGNED HEARING is out now via Most Dismal Swamp.

Terence Sharpe is an artist and researcher based in Berlin. His work focuses on the nexus between biology, cognition and technology. He has been published through Triple Ampersand Publishing &&& and has presented his work at Trust, Spike Quarterly and Phi Centre Montreal. He is affiliated with the New York based research collective ANON and a member of The New Centre for Research and Practice.

RJM & Emilie Ruitinga: Does the knife cry when it enters the skin
(1:00:16)

Recorded at Operator Radio Rotterdam, NL — April 2019

Tracklist:
Sante Maria Romitelli - Il Mosaico E Completo
Kreng - Ballet Van De Bloedhoeren
Alessandro Alessandroni - The Dark Castle
Alessandro Alessandroni - Deadly Beauty
Aghast - Enter the Hall of Ice
Black Sabbath - FX
Jean-Bernard Raiteux - The Inquisition
Jacula - Long Black Magic Night (RJM edit)
Autopsia - Does The Knife Cry When It Enters The Skin
Clock DVA - The Sonology of Sex 1
Jean-Bernard Raiteux - The Second Inquisition
Kreng - Petit Grimoire
Aghast - Enthrall
David Holmes - Is He Dead?
Autopsia - Anxiety 1982
Ennio Morricone - La fine degli Amanti
Roberto Nicolosi - I Tre Volti Della Paura
Sante Maria Romitelli - La Luna Di Miele
Alessandro Alessandroni - Demon Night III
Riz Ortolani - Nella Stretta Morsa Del Ragno
Alessandro Alessandroni - Demon Arise
Sante Maria Romitelli - Tessere Di Un Mosaico
Autopsia - Tape Loop Constitutes The Eternity Of Hell
Sante Maria Romitelli - La Casa Di Mode

RJM Vanderheyden is an interdisciplinary artist drawn towards the transgressive, visceral bodily explorations and prurient meanderings. Together with Puck Schot she performs as Vot’ress, which loosely embraces Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, and the role of Robin “Puck” Goodfellow; a demonic, mischievous sprite. They experiment with synthesis and modulation, creating ambient soundscapes and distortion, layered with spoken word and found-footage.

She recently released an alternative soundtrack to Walerian Borowczyk’s erotic cult film Contes Immoraux on the Rotterdam imprint No Hay Banda. RJM is currently working on a soundtrack to the infamous 1989 porn film ‘On The Prowl’. In this Gonzo video, Jamie Gillis ‘drives the streets of San Francisco in a limousine together with performer Renee Morgan, picking up random guys willing to have sex with her. Unscripted and focused on (and fetishizing) “reality” and “authenticity,” this new style privileged raw depiction of sexual pleasure without traditional narrative, aesthetic, or performative considerations.’

Video by Emilie Ruitinga; edits from ‘Dreams That Money Can Buy’ (1947), Filmstudie (1926) Ghosts Before Breakfast (1928), by Hans Richter and other found footage.

soundcloud.com/rjmvanderheyden
emilieruitinga.nl

IZEY: Xaptation
(02:13)

“Xaptation” is the title track from IZEY's album. A 30 minutes exploration of sounds replicating the ghosts of a post-industrial landscape: sawn wood, plastic bags rustling and growling creatures form layered soundscapes. Sampling and sound processing, at the core of Xaptation, aims to resemble the violence of resource extraction and the tangled ecologies of creatures and critters through manipulation and granular synthesis.

Melodic rests convey the haunting sounds of absence and loss and echo the lament of irrevocable damage. Synthetic and natural sounds coalesce and out the wreckage hybrid forms emerge.

soundcloud.com/i_z_e_y/
izey.bandcamp.com/releases
instagram.com/i.z.e.y/

Sol Bailey-Barker: Wyrd Lodge : Black Temple
(08:35)

We are Ancient Transhumanists, we have always strived to be more than human through biomicry. We have evolved through this imitation of the natural world over millions years and it was as early as 2.2 million years ago that our ancestors began to shape rocks into tools; body hacking, hands becoming rocks for smashing bones and cutting and scrapping: this the ancient beginning of transhumanism.
The rhythmic sound of breaking rocks is echoed by the sounds of modern industry, where machine hands with super human speed and dexterity carry out the tasks of creation once the dominion of tribal leaders and shamans now the dominion of 0 and 1s .
It is believed that the sounds of tool making and the communication in teaching others mastery, is the origin of speech. Technology this ancient magic allowing hands to become rocks to become knives, wood to become warmth and crumbling minerals to become steel.
Now we transcend into the post human epoch; building robotic entities in imitation of ourselves, but striving to make them more than human, to build the gods we have lost and so desire to have come from.
As we develop exoskeletons, artificial ears, eyes and memory implants, improving strength and our senses, we become post human.
If time is not linear but all time is present at once, then the mushrooms that laid the way for life on land billions of years ago and the first rock bashed into a tool, the last individual in Space, the first ritual and the last are all present and reverberating here and now.
This dystopian Utopia, is the beginning and the end.

Film & soundtrack by Sol Bailey-Barker
With cinematography by Ruben Woodin Dechamps

https://soundcloud.com/sol-bailey-barker-1
solbaileybarker.com

Alexandra Koumantaki: Memories From the Valley of Uncanny 
(07:06)

A distance from the past, Will make a better future.
A quiet war destroyed everything.
We all had forgotten what violence was. The catastrophe was gratifying.
Kissed and embraced us goodnight.
When it woke up.
It wasn’t what it used to be.
No form. No body.
Only an idea of a memory. The last words were...
“Everything it’s going to be ok” It made it more angry.
It crawl into the dust of sweet end. And resurfaced.

HD video
Clay, silicone, wires, LED
Filmed in Naxos island, Greece in summer 2019
All materials composed and edited by Alexandra Koumantaki, Athens 2020
alexandrakoumantaki.com

Mark Leckey: The Catyrids are Leaving the City 
(59:35)


feat. 

Bit of Vampyre
Ain't It Grand to be Bloomin' Well Dead by George Jackley 
Bela Lugosi's Dead by Bauhaus (Mark Leckey dub mix)
Jah Shaka at Arlow Road, Deptford 1986
Synth Ambience Warm-Up by Martin Hamnett
55 Degrees North 3 Degrees West by Pilot
NatWest Advert
See How They Run - Gazelle Twin
Doppel from It Follows by Disasterpiece
Pennywise - Neuromancer
Scottie - Subnation
The Boxed Opened - Human Being
Cry Theme - Klein
X Womens History Museum by Odwalla 88 
Prologue by Klein
Purr Hi-Giggle by Odwalla 88

Amy Cutler & Graham Dunning: The Cultivator 
(03:24)

an audio-visual hot-house morality tale / a synth out-take from The Flowering of the Strange Orchid



H. G. Wells’ 1894 short story of corpse-like inflorescence and “spore fear” relocated from a swamp to a private orchid-house outside London was based on the threat of what Linnaeus categorised Cryptogamia: those members of the plant kingdom whose methods of fertilization remained mysterious - & therefore speculative & queer. The story of the unidentifiable mangrove swamp orchid follows a “strange twist of the labellum”, with unknown contagions/fevers, sickly tentacular perfume, temperature-controlled fungal growths, mysterious swamp stains, hothouse fainting and unexplained death.

This video and score is an outgrowth from Amy Cutler and Graham Dunning’s quarantine collaboration PILOTS, all available online. It is a phosphorescent annotation of the original text, made with ingredients including a home-made water torch for light scattering while reading (a cracked light-bulb filled with water and attached to a torch), and fizzing bath salts in water, used to animate 35mm archive slides of swamp tree fungus. The soundtrack of interweaving, polymetric synth patterns and distant dub stabs recalls spongy earth, shifting unevenly underfoot.


PILOTS (https://amycutler.net/pilots), Cutler and Dunning’s daily project as a duo, are named after the pilot fish, the spiny-finned jackfish said to precede the shark, but also pilot holes, pilot lights, and the pilot episode or experimental broadcast.

PILOTS are a series of lock-down windowsill experiments, B-roll jingles / idents, mudlarks, and petridish horizons. Like scratches or rushes, they are micro-improvisations which test out environments. Inspired by early hand-cranked cinema specimens, they often use household objects, pound-shop lenses and DIY instruments, night lights or lullaby machines, freezer ice, plant matter, and novelty “dizzy glasses”. They also often feature Cutler’s collections of magic lantern and 35mm slides from private and public garden tours and botanical archives of the 1940s-1970s.

As a duo they also perform live improvisation, including their April gigs for I Am An Instrument and The Old Police House, Newcastle (April 24th), with an evolving set which includes deadly nightshade “film soup”, greenhouse field-recordings after dark, visuals with toy goo aka “glow in the dark ectoplasm”, tape hiss, Dunning’s invented instruments such as the Featherphone, and the B-movie sounds achieved from just a bow on a pinecone.



Graham Dunning (grahamdunning.com) is self-taught as an artist and musician having studied neither discipline academically. His live work explores sound as texture, timbre and something tactile, drawing on bedroom production, tinkering and recycling found objects. He also creates visual work, video and installations drawing on these themes.

Much of the work evolves through experimentation with different processes: considering the methods by which sounds become music; process as a continuum encompassing both improvisational and procedural methods; and testing analogous processes across different media.


Dr. Amy Cutler (amycutler.net) is a cultural geographer, performer, and live cinema artist who works with ideas of geography and nonhuman others. She is interested in hacking the formulaic expectations of nature documentary, undoing the ways in which it domesticates reality at certain scales, and returning it to its form as a performative laboratory film and a hands-on experiment “in the round”. Cutler often works with live musicians in improvisation, including her forest episode of Late Junction with Lee Patterson and Barrel, her ongoing duo with multi-instrumentalist Sylvia Hallett, and her ‘Oh What Monsters’ tour with French pianist and composer Delphine Dora. Her writings for these live collaborations often draw on and hack nature sources, from Victorian textbooks and popular insect science to early VHS.

Crisis: View From Nowhere
(02:57)

"This video came to me when working on Instagram face filters. 

Again and again I would see selfies in which the camera flash was reflected in a mirror, hiding the user's face, which was sometimes framed by Snapchat’s cartoon dog ears. Like a ghost taking a picture, or like they had been consumed by something.

I was also re-reading William Gibson's Neuromancer and this quote stood out to me.

'...Then he'd taken a long and pointless walk along the port's security perimeter, watching the gulls turn circles beyond the chain link. There was a gray place, an impression of fine screens shifting, moire, degrees of half tone generated by a very simple graphics program. There was a long hold on a view through chainlink, gulls frozen above dark water. There were voices.'"

Directed and animated by Prosper
https://www.instagram.com/prosper99999/

Concept art by Laura N-Tamara
https://www.instagram.com/niwakins/

https://www.instagram.com/flesh_crisis/
https://soundcloud.com/freshcrisis

Michelle Hannah: GPT-3
(04:05)

GPT-3 is a neural-network-powered language model that predicts the likelihood of a sentence existing in the world. The Open AI was 'asked' what it's intuitions are about consciousness. The spoken word is taken directly from passages of what it 'says'. An artificial lament to remants of a haunted mud filled queer future.

Filmed at a local teenage hangout beside Linn Park Cemetery in Glasgow during lockdown. Photo of Alexander McQueen courtesy of The Face magazine April 1998 issue.

Recorded, mixed and mastered by MH 2020 ©

Never Worse: set 23.11.2019 
(29:43)

https://soundcloud.com/never_worse

Agnese Cebere: chome_scan
(10:25)

The machine vision of a drone surveying the terrain below traverses the image. We see a synthetic topography with a translucent and reflective surface that resembles liquid metal. It is pure reflection, an abstraction, which is to say that it reflects nothing; it is reflection itself, an empty vessel on display, working like an index by pointing away from itself with nothing at its core.

The three acts of this video represent three different ways of seeing: the smooth tracing of a pattern across a field, the capture of frames along this same path (a simulation of the shutter at work), and improvised movement based on a sensuous experience of seeing. Through all these modes of traversing the surface, it remains machinic, even as it simulates spontaneity. Act III works in the same way as a Ouija board: the inanimate comes alive and surprises even the hand that moves it.

The underlying still image of a cascading waterfall was captured on film, developed, scanned, and digitally filtered to transform the depth of the image plane into a topographical map of sorts. The view of the landscape becomes the landscape itself—the water frozen and everything around it liquified.

Gerard Carson: Petrobios 77 Lockdown
(07:23)

Working with lithic and viscous materials, Gerard Carson is an artist based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His works speculate on the machinic desire of mineral extraction and the ever growing webs of material contingency.

www.gerardcarson.com

(37:01)

@billie0cean
https://soundcloud.com/dionysianromance

Amy Cutler & Graham Dunning: The Cultivator 
(03:24)

an audio-visual hot-house morality tale / a synth out-take from The Flowering of the Strange Orchid



H. G. Wells’ 1894 short story of corpse-like inflorescence and “spore fear” relocated from a swamp to a private orchid-house outside London was based on the threat of what Linnaeus categorised Cryptogamia: those members of the plant kingdom whose methods of fertilization remained mysterious - & therefore speculative & queer. The story of the unidentifiable mangrove swamp orchid follows a “strange twist of the labellum”, with unknown contagions/fevers, sickly tentacular perfume, temperature-controlled fungal growths, mysterious swamp stains, hothouse fainting and unexplained death.

This video and score is an outgrowth from Amy Cutler and Graham Dunning’s quarantine collaboration PILOTS, all available online. It is a phosphorescent annotation of the original text, made with ingredients including a home-made water torch for light scattering while reading (a cracked light-bulb filled with water and attached to a torch), and fizzing bath salts in water, used to animate 35mm archive slides of swamp tree fungus. The soundtrack of interweaving, polymetric synth patterns and distant dub stabs recalls spongy earth, shifting unevenly underfoot.


PILOTS (https://amycutler.net/pilots), Cutler and Dunning’s daily project as a duo, are named after the pilot fish, the spiny-finned jackfish said to precede the shark, but also pilot holes, pilot lights, and the pilot episode or experimental broadcast.

PILOTS are a series of lock-down windowsill experiments, B-roll jingles / idents, mudlarks, and petridish horizons. Like scratches or rushes, they are micro-improvisations which test out environments. Inspired by early hand-cranked cinema specimens, they often use household objects, pound-shop lenses and DIY instruments, night lights or lullaby machines, freezer ice, plant matter, and novelty “dizzy glasses”. They also often feature Cutler’s collections of magic lantern and 35mm slides from private and public garden tours and botanical archives of the 1940s-1970s.

As a duo they also perform live improvisation, including their April gigs for I Am An Instrument and The Old Police House, Newcastle (April 24th), with an evolving set which includes deadly nightshade “film soup”, greenhouse field-recordings after dark, visuals with toy goo aka “glow in the dark ectoplasm”, tape hiss, Dunning’s invented instruments such as the Featherphone, and the B-movie sounds achieved from just a bow on a pinecone.



Graham Dunning (grahamdunning.com) is self-taught as an artist and musician having studied neither discipline academically. His live work explores sound as texture, timbre and something tactile, drawing on bedroom production, tinkering and recycling found objects. He also creates visual work, video and installations drawing on these themes.

Much of the work evolves through experimentation with different processes: considering the methods by which sounds become music; process as a continuum encompassing both improvisational and procedural methods; and testing analogous processes across different media.


Dr. Amy Cutler (amycutler.net) is a cultural geographer, performer, and live cinema artist who works with ideas of geography and nonhuman others. She is interested in hacking the formulaic expectations of nature documentary, undoing the ways in which it domesticates reality at certain scales, and returning it to its form as a performative laboratory film and a hands-on experiment “in the round”. Cutler often works with live musicians in improvisation, including her forest episode of Late Junction with Lee Patterson and Barrel, her ongoing duo with multi-instrumentalist Sylvia Hallett, and her ‘Oh What Monsters’ tour with French pianist and composer Delphine Dora. Her writings for these live collaborations often draw on and hack nature sources, from Victorian textbooks and popular insect science to early VHS.

Terence Sharpe: WHAT LUXURY IT WOULD BE TO DESCRIBE THIS RACE AS CEDED
(04:42)

WHAT LUXURY IT WOULD BE TO DESCRIBE THIS RACE AS CEDED is a visual companion to the polemic essay 'A Ceded Interfile: Future-oriented Social and Cognitive Design' published through The New Centre for Research and Practice’s &&& platform in July 2019.

The video is a non-linear redux of the idea that two separate trajectories of man and machine is a false correlation rooted in bad humanism. The essay takes the field of Kansei or Affective Engineering as an example of a mechanism that sees the nature of man and machine as a kind of ouroboros to be - the collection of data is an open dragnet across the sea of content nature produces, but its manipulation and use on humans within their ecosystem requires a system of codification and divisive application – one that hasn’t been created yet, but one that companies like Cambridge Analytica have been able to convince people exists via a narrative engineered towards those blinded by banal pathologies of their own relevance. The video backdrop to these considerations is a quick and dirty assemblage of user generated content, both personal and salvaged, realising through rough aesthetics that the screen-based existence that has flattened the dynamics of the everyday and the enchanting, leaves a lot to be desired from our tale end whatever epoch we are currently passing through. This collection of work is complimented by the release of FEIGNED HEARING (2020) - the first iteration in a three-part series of electroacoustic compositions, drawing from live recordings, foley sound and synthesis. FEIGNED HEARING is out now via Most Dismal Swamp.

Terence Sharpe is an artist and researcher based in Berlin. His work focuses on the nexus between biology, cognition and technology. He has been published through Triple Ampersand Publishing &&& and has presented his work at Trust, Spike Quarterly and Phi Centre Montreal. He is affiliated with the New York based research collective ANON and a member of The New Centre for Research and Practice.

(still)

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An Trinse: Ethics of Display
(13:47)

An Trinse is Northern Irish artist Stephen McLaughlin who has spent the last decade in London and has been releasing ambient music on his own label since 2015. 
 
His music deals with the uneasy atmospheres and silences left in the Irish psyche in the aftermath of colonial and religious repression. It serves as an excavation and exorcism rite of this emotional stasis and asks whether it's better to disavow these sentiments to exist day to day or confront them head on in search for some kind of resolution. 

He has shared a stage with JK Flesh (Justin Broadwick of Jesu, Godlflesh, Techno Animal etc) at London’s legendary experimental music venue Cafe OTO and the new master of West Coast minimalism Sarah Davachi which is a testament to his ability to navigate between monolithic sheets of bass and delicate ambient melody.

Recent work has involved audio-visual investigations that point to a global prehistoric society with advanced manufacturing technology that was destroyed by some kind of apocalyptic event in the distant past leaving few clues to their origin. Something especially troubling here deep in the Anthropocene where signs of societal and ecological collapse seem to loom. Imagining the interfaces of these lost technologies (coupled with megalith expert Julian Cope’s Sardinian road novel ‘131’ where the protagonist finds he can travel to the ancient past through prodigious use of psychedelics) led to a visual language based on ancient sites rendered in 3D being examined and dissolved by an imagined archaeological traveller. 

https://an-trinse.bandcamp.com

(still)

Thomas Yeomans: Just For Today
(19:20)


thomasyeomans.com/

Tracklist:

Duckman's Rant
Syvyydessä Kimallus - Ø
Pray To God - Calvin Harris ft. Haim
Blinded By The Lights - The Streets
Running Up That Hill - Kate Bush
The Unforgiven - Metallica
Bootylicious - Destiny's Child
Kids - Stranger Things OST
Digital Bath - Deftones
In The Air Tonight - Phil Collins
Kill Em With Kindness - Selena Gomez
Amen, Amen! - Thomas Yeomans
Take Me Away - Mix Factory (XTC Come Hard Mix)
Wild Thoughts - DJ Khaled ft. Rihanna, Bryson Tiller
Somebody Someone - Korn
Roads - Portishead
No Type - Rae Sremmurd

Lexxi Doomer (whiterose): ribs_sinner_lives
(06:42)

Anna Mikkola & Pekka Airaxin: "This Earth Like Planet (Episode 1: The First Synthetic Cell)"
(08:54)

Text and video by Anna Mikkola
Sound by Pekka Airaxin

Kid Xanthrax: "Hypergnosissy"
(16:46)

A lesser known and sparsely wielded terminology embedded in psychopathological discourse emanates with severe intensity and curious pathetic fallacy for a discipline so fraught and obnoxiously academic. Hypergnosis or hypergnosia both earn a red underline (conspiratorial minds may be tempted to question this admission from the lexicon) and yet the delusional state which causes one to project neurosis onto externality feels all too familiar in a world where even Post Truth has lost stability of definition. It is precisely the habit of expanding psychotic perception (psychological drives, internal neurosis etc.) into elaborate delusional doctrine (*cough... western philosophy), also definitive of Freudian psychoanalytics, which pierces the heart of the heretic, the gnostic. Heresy functionally presupposes a generally accepted dogmatism, yet now the ancient goliath of monotheism has exploded into increasingly infinitesimal shrapnel, heresy is more rampant than ever -- paradoxically rendering itself nonexistent.

Surfing this neoreactionary Mobius Strip, our moment has plunged into a state of HYPERGNOSISSY, an auto-hypnosis characterized by rapid orientation-switch-reorientation figure-eighting, dizzily spinning through ideological rupture, one collapse after the other. We are no longer confused about our sexual identity, we have resolved to cannibalize eachother toothless and insatiable, swallowing our mate whole. This macro-schizophrenic haze through which we all swagger is a catastrophe festival soundtracked by brostep EDM drops where you ingest pesticide to get high. It is a carnival of clickbait, mascotted by meme man and pepe, crawling with every sexy minion you never asked to see. It is not heresy, it is hyper-heresy, it is time collapsing, a broken internal clock on my laptop causing ruptures in file structure, no end or beginning just a weird loop of sponsored content bombardment, a rapid influx of every ad you’ve ever witnessed in the span of a minute. 

Axioms of image death and subsequent zombification of the spectacle preface a psychotrance neural meltdown. We are no longer passively identifying with this spectacle -- we are killing it, merging with it via anthropomorphization, and walking dead in it as host. We are awake dreaming, sleepwalking through an ever-elaborated wasteland of dead images and symbology. 

HYPERGNOSISSY is a video examining the delusional externality which contracts into internal neurosis. It is a massive post-cultural anti-montage; a hypercollage for the end of media. It is a neural epic,  sissyhypno on /gif/ but for late Capital, applying a Burroughsian cut-up methodology wherein temporality is smashed and meme logic prevails. HYPERGNOSISSY is as much a video essay as it is a pornopunk animutation, a visual harsh noise wall, Youtube poop, a vore video, and an accelerationist psychotrance fantasy.

¥€$Si Perse: "COPCRAFT - ACAB HEX"
(32:32)

ACAB HEX is a Spell Against Police States. 
A gameplay walkthrough from Hong Kong, Chile, Barcelona, 
to latest BLM protests in the USA and across the world, summoning the antifa energy from the riots against current global right-wing populism.
This mixtape works as a Cop Malediction.
No justice, No peace, Defund the Police.
No justice, No peace, HEX the Police.

¥€$Si PERSE (b. 2015, Internet)

¥€$Si Perse is a fiction suit – a hyperstitional interface – that allows its wearers to enter into alternative narratives. This acts as both a point of departure from this world and a form of communication with it.

This parapersona is a continuous-under-construction Avatar, an otherkin/cyborg creature incarnating the idea that concepts such as Body and Identity belong to the Fantasy Realm. Manifesting, formally and performatively, in an RPG (Role Play Game) character -a radical mutant xenofaery- lost in the neurodungeon of an “€conomystical Cybermedieval scenery”, where elements of science fiction collapse with Sword and Sorcery Fantasy.

The current work of ¥€$Si revolves around the mutation of institutional artistic performance with memetic variations that come from popular performative formalizations such as party contexts (using the DJ Set as a format), Cosplay / Larp Conventions (Live Role) and Online Communities.

SWARMM: "KENOPSIA"
(06:08)

The eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that’s usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet—a school hallway in the evening, an unlit office on a weekend, vacant fairgrounds—an emotional afterimage that makes it seem not just empty but hyper-empty, with a total population in the negative, who are so conspicuously absent they glow like neon signs.

Etymology: From Greek, kenosis "emptiness" + opsia "seeing"

"I wonder into a large dark space. The installation piece is held in the centre of what looks like an abandoned warehouse. Real plants and trees are used, grass flooring, a hill.

This collage is cut up by scrim screens at angular distances, blurring perspective by its disfigured shape. Scrim is stretched over construction beams. Mirrors and studio flooring is patched in between the grass and screens. As I walk closer, depth begins to bend, quickly I realise that a facade of nature, one which mimics that of the physical installation, is projected from multiple angles, the illusion crumbles as I walk closer. 

Scaffolding and scrim juts out of the mirage of digital trees and shafts of light. Performers in motion capture suits; mostly black, wearing sticks with motion capture spheres on the end around the neck, like a ruffle, but pointing up in floral formation. Scale and perspective distorted. Transparent plastic material hang around the space, reflecting light and sound, refracting different rays of an unseen spectrum. Neon markers are placed on the actors and around the space. Everything breaths like on an acid trip. The sounds is that of being in a womb. Distant hissing, popping and clicking can be heard. I feel helpless."

// The music, which is the first track of an unreleased album of the same name,is about the manipulation of ones perception of depth and space, using the dream note description of the space as a key element. This was realised by recreating 3 distinct spaces based off of dreams, the main one being the large dark space, which I created a 3D aircraft hanger for. 

// The aircraft hanger that I 3D modelled had a similar size to the one in my dream note. I used Unreal Engine to simulate the physical acoustic properties of the space, down to the reflective acoustical properties of the building materials, mainly concrete and sheet metal. I used Impulse response Utility to capture impulse responses of this virtual space, and used it as a reverb within my production. 

// Throughout the album, I also have emitted audio within the virtual space, and captured my realtime movements around the space, similar to playing sets of speakers with different musical elements, and walking around with a 2 mic binaural setup, and capturing it. These elements are normally heavily sound design based.

// The 2nd space was that of a hospital store cupboard, the acoustic properties being small, boxy, and hollow. For this I captured impulse responses of a similar room in my house.

// The 3rd space was that of a long corridor, with some display like rooms jutting off at equal distances, as far as the eye could see. The acoustic properties for this was dense, dry, and heavily manipulated. 

// There is an air of melancholia which runs throughout the album; a forgotten sadness, or empty nostalgia for distant fading memories of spaces which truly do not exist, but permeated into hyper-real existence through the use of spatial simulation, and architectural design and visualisation.
This is a play on ‘kenosis’, meaning emptiness. This is referring to, not only the physical manifestation of emptiness, but the feelings of emptiness. This is projected through a guise of UK bass music, more specifically weightless grime, an instrumental abstraction from its abrasive rap orientated counterpart.