An extended and addled meditation on ‘gangcrafting,’ community-driven structure tasks within multiplayer online videogames, MUSH is equivalent parts movie essay, cursed ASMR and odd fiction.
Most Dismal Swamp is both a location and a practice. Emerging out of the curatorial experiments of Dane Sutherland, who’s focus had formerly focused around gallery exhibits, distributive sonic fiction, club nights and other live occasions, Most Dismal Swamp is explained by its developer as “an art task, a curatorial MMORPG, a fiction, a celebration, and a mixed-reality biome.” Launching the job back in 2019 with Swamp Protocol at arebyte gallery and Whale Fall at Gossamer Fog, 2 of London’s leading audiovisual art areas, Most Dismal Swamp gestures towards a brand-new kind of group program, one that exists contiguously inbetween physical area and localised virtual worlds developed with the reveal function of checkingout the connections inbetween synergistic mixed-media art practices. “Most Dismal Swamp conjuresup the overload as a conceptual design for understanding and browsing our present blended truth paradigm,” discusses Sutherland. “Simultaneously strong land and fluid water, yet likewise neither, swamps embody a geography of muddy indistinction, and the horizonless area of context collapse. They stimulate a taxonomic heresy that prohibits simple separation and parsing of strong kinds. This is substantial for understanding a modern condition that hasactually supplanted the teleology of modernity and the fragmentation of postmodernity with the knotted concurrence of numerous, embedded reasonings.” Presenting speculative choreography, digital artwork, physical sculpture and mystical craft as cooperative functions of the intense overload, Sutherland has settled on a design that quickly permits for the permeation of the borders inbetween discipline and medium, redefining the exhibit as an organism that curates as it is curated, gushing forth fresh significance from its fecund ooze.
MUSH is the mostcurrent model of this procedure, an immersive world develop adjusted from a site-specific setup at the 2021 edition of Mira Festival in Barcelona, that blurs the lines inbetween movie essay, cursed ASMR and unusual fiction. At once a an extended and addled meditation on ‘gangcrafting,’ community-driven structure jobs within multiplayer online videogames, and a declaration of intent from Most Dismal Swamp more usually, MUSH, which stands for Multi-User Shared Hallucination, probes at the stress-points of virtual worlds constructed both for online neighborhoods and by online neighborhoods. “I desired to welcome individuals muchdeeper into the dank k-hole of dissociative reality-modeling and world-building of our present platform-mediated sociality, purposefully nontransparent and with the sensation of passingthrough an abysmal overload,” states Sutherland. “I began the job from a position of showing on the capacity future of post-pandemic social balkanization: the term MUSH is obtained from the field of online text-based role-playing videogames. It refers to the common financialinvestment in and social codification of a shared gamespace: the guidelines, implied procedures, principles, and other developed components which permit it to be an successfully immersive area unique from an ‘outside’ world.” The work continuously toys with this difference, as remarkably rendered sediment homes uneven sculptures that stage shift inbetween the virtual and the physical, cold wastelands of disposedof keepsaneyeon and slick mud present stylised videofootage of human entertainers misshapen with silicon garments, meme sweatshirts, silver preciousjewelry and algorithmically-induced problem, as hollowed-out avatars, far-future shells of the neighborhood revealed crafting, and crafted by, the world of MUSH, drift by unconcerned.
“MUSH is interested in the arcane, encrypted cultures thriving amongst the recesses of an online megalopolis and enhanced by offline organisation and social balkanization,” continues Sutherland. “Maintaining vulnerable neighborhoods in platform-mediated scenarios suggests browsing fluidly heavy-handed terms and conditions, gamified feedcrafting algorithms, algorithmic populism, falseinformation, truth businessowners, meme beginning and punitive control such as shadow-banning. While offline, the closure of lotsof havingahardtime metropolitan places as devices of varied community-building and public discourse, as well as the introduction of phenomena such as ‘astroturfing’, implies that numerous neighborhoods lookfor and welcome alternative, personal, or ‘off-grid’ areas. From trust-based cryptoraves to sub rosa chat servers. The integrated hardwiring of possessive individualism and implied online interaction procedures hasactually altered popular discourse: militantly aggressive filter bubbles competing to signal-boost their house baked ‘truths’ and jury-rigged reality-models. The outcome is a swamp-like, inextricably knotted, adversarial Mixed Reality system: a fete of amateur heresies, microworld-building procedures, and dog-whistle memetics. Systemic ideological partition and quarantine hence ferments a long-tail of forking truths.” Real-world dramaturgy triggers up versus digital sigils and mutant glyphs that gesture towards the brand-new kinds of awareness born in the mixed-media sludge, as the disembodied storytellers declaim, “a deep fried conlang of survival and of cheat-code elementalism.” Tattooed flesh liquifies in crude acrylic and severe light, each a brand-new texture within the verysame environment.
What emerges from the overload are world-specific exchanges, gestures establishing into routines establishing into group practices, the back-and-forth of the group chat manifested in blended truth, slurred together in the dissociative reasoning of a k-hole. Within their shared hallucination, the borders inbetween environment and organism, inbetween intimate gesture and implicit procedure, liquify within shared area, self-contained artwork are opened out into the flexible, fertile density of the world, which in turn is specified by the oscillation inbetween existence and withdrawal of these artwork skilled as a outcome of Sutherland’s instructions and curation. The movie’s climactic image embodies both the range and the resonances his practice has from and with the history of curation: a GAN-altered, post-apocalyptic Ophelia, laid out in sludge and curtained in sheet plastic, heaving shallow breaths, Sir John Everett Millais reimagined as a cyber goth. It’s in this method that the graphics of Stephen McLaughlin, the digital setups and world style of Joey Holder and Samuel Capps, the collages of Lou Shafer, the Blender animations and style of Aquabubz and Tissue Hunter, the graphics and typography of Post Cyberparamo, the 3D character style of Oliva Svetlanova, the silicon garments of vvxxii and Johanna Invrea, the garments of Iain Ball and Timothy Gasparro, the sculpture of Hannah Rose Stewart, Agnieszka Szostek, Yiming Yang, Sian Fan and Laura Costas, the illustration of Matt Cangiano, the choreography of Laila Majid, the efficiency of V Shetsova, Luke Magill, Furi, Lora Angelova and Susanna Husebø, the electroniccamera of Julia Brown, the composing of Dane Sutherland and the music of FRKTL fills out and terraforms the world as one entity, a shared hallucination, a most miserable overload.
For more info about Most Dismal Swamp you can follow the job on Instagram and see the Most Dismal Swamp site.
MUSH Credits:
Curated and Directed – Most Dismal Swamp
Edit and FX – Most Dismal Swamp, Stephen McLaughlin
‘Semelparous’ Installation – Joey Holder
Unreal Engine 5 World and ‘Exudater’ Installation – Samuel Capps
MUSH Collages – Lou Shafer
Blender Animations – Aquabubz
Blender Wall Decal – Tissue Hunter
Additional 2D Graphics and Animated Typography – Post Cyberparamo
3D Animated Figures – Olia Svetlanova
Silicone Garments – vvxxii, Johanna Invrea
DOOBIE WEB 2009 Sweatshirts – Iain Ball
Jewellery – Timothy Gasbarro
Sculptures – Hannah Rose Stewart, Agnieszka Szostek, Yiming Yang, Sian Fan, Laura Costas
‘Spirit’s Gravity’ Illustration – Matt Cangiano
Choreography – Most Dismal Swamp, Laila Majid
Performers – V Shetsova, Luke Magill, Furi, Lora Angelova, Susanna Husebø
Camera – Julia Brown
Words – Most Dismal Swamp
Music – FRKTL
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