Screening: Dismal Session 003: Terence Sharpe / WHAT LUXURY IT WOULD BE TO DESCRIBE THIS RACE AS CEDED

WHAT LUXURY IT WOULD BE TO DESCRIBE THIS RACE AS CEDED (2019) is a visual companion to polemic 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 Foreign Hearing (2019) - the first iteration in a three-part series of electroacoustic compositions, drawing from live recordings, foley sound and synthesis. The pieces sit on a knife's edge between the halcyon and the turbulent, eschewing the theoretical branches of the project and allowing the music to breathe simply as a personal soundtrack to the exhilarating transience of the past decade.

Most Dismal Swamp launches a new channel, 'Dismal Sessions': an ongoing series of dank mixes, fermented visions, sacred files, trash vector collect calls, ambient occlusions, cursed ASMR, sublime leaks and bad datasets. Among the first batch of Dismal Sessions is WHAT LUXURY IT WOULD BE TO DESCRIBE THIS RACE AS CEDED by Terence Sharpe.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. .. Terence Sharpe