Whale Fall is a distributed film project by Most Dismal Swamp, featuring new art and music from 19 artists working across installation, music, fashion, game design, CGI, performance and digital media. Whale Fall can be watched online at www.mostdismalswamp.com and also as part of a site-specific installation at Gossamer Fog, London automated by Christopher Maciness and featuring new installation by AGF Hydra, Hannah Rose Stewart, Department of Decay and @baojiaxiang.
Whale Fall is a heretical bestiary; an anomalous taxonomy of the diverse bodies that inhabit the hallucinatory mixed-reality paradigm of our contemporary swampscape. When a whale's carcass falls deep into the ocean abyss, over time its decaying body hosts a diverse ecology of surrounding species while also birthing altogether new life. It's body is a fetid dataset for biological speculations. Whale Fall plumbs these biological depths by invoking the long-tail of post-digital bodies and how they challenge orthodox conceptions of personhood, intelligence, corporeality, and life. Their heresy is to question what bodies are, and to explore instead what they can be. The film combines scenes shot on location with various artists, a bespoke virtual environment hosting a weird biome of digital life, with other commissioned footage and CGI: a new model for curating and exhibiting artists' work according to the ethos of Most Dismal Swamp.
The result is an ambient and hallucinatory glimpse into of the lives of these speculative ecologies. Multiple logics, systems, and realities are entangled within Whale Fall, illustrating the mixed-reality paradigm we live in: a pervasive, horizonless swampscape that seems at once ecstatic, dismal and absurd.
Whale Fall's strange ecology is intensified by a delirious soundtrack by producer Jennifer Walton. This music will also be released on the EP 'Winged // Dislocated' via the Most Dismal Swamp label soon.
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