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Dismal Sessions is an ongoing series of dank mixes, fermented visions, sacred texts, trash vector collect calls, ambient occlusions, cursed ASMR, sublime leaks and bad datasets; an ecstatic content collapse. The Dismal Sessions are audio-visual artefacts by various visual artists, musicians, DJs, avatars, producers, machines, sprites, poets, homies, and more. This virtual exhibition brings together the first 21 Dismal Sessions. It is a sprawling underground festival in which to immerse; a thick tangle of uneven and combined heresies in which to lose yourself.
Emphasising the murky boundaries between platform-mediated realities, the diverse range of practices represented in the Dismal Sessions ferment a post-digital conspiracy. Shiny renders clang dissonantly against deep-fried aesthetics in multi-modal works whose variegated roots reach towards cataclysmic and sometimes blasphemous understandings of contemporary culture. Built upon the long and fractalized histories of countless subcultures, subreddits and subterranean secrets, the Dismal Sessions sprout from the disasters and dissociation that define being in the world today.
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Most Dismal Swamp is a project that operates at different scales and registers; through multiple and simultaneous dimensions. It is an art platform, a social media account, a mixed reality biome, a curatorial MMORPG, a party, a forecasting laboratory, a miasma, a fiction, and a record label.
Most Dismal Swamp invokes the swamp as a conceptual model for understanding and navigating our present mixed reality paradigm. Simultaneously solid land and fluid water yet also neither, swamps embody a topology of muddy indistinction, and the horizonless territory of context collapse. They engender a taxonomic heresy that disallows easy separation and parsing of solid forms. This is significant for understanding a contemporary condition that has supplanted the teleology of modernity and the fragmentation of postmodernity with the entangled simultaneity of multiple, nested logics. A mixed reality paradigm that blurs, combines and superposes fact and fiction, nature and culture, technology and occult, virtual and real, authentic and synthetic, liquid and solid, science and mysticism, self and other, dry silicon and wet biology, online and offline, human and nonhuman... From these fetid recombinations, a night science of swamp angels and dank enlightenment emerges and flourishes like moss across the cold stone of modern ruins: globally variable synaesthesia intensifies!