Assume Form
April 4 – May 24, 2026
Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College

Curated by: Emily Nola
Artist/Participants: Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, Lendl Barcelos, Oneohtrix Point Never, 0rphan Drift, Sadie Plant

In 1995, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) was formed at the University of Warwick in England. Initiated within the Department of Philosophy by theorist and research fellow Sadie Plant, the unit produced a collectively authored body of work that straddled theory and fiction. The collective and its collaborators operated on the fringes of academia, drawing on a wide range of influences including continental philosophy, science fiction, and electronic music. Moving across forms both native and unique to the philosophical discipline including essays, zines, performances, and events, their work attempted to expand the limits of theoretical production. At the advent of the World Wide Web, amidst a present and future unsettled by emergent technologies, they turned to the speculative to interpret these new terrains.

A wide range of figures emerge from the CCRU’s annals. It is this mixed legacy of various influential, maligned, and underexplored practices that led to the uneven dissemination of the milieu’s output via the very platform they grappled with: the internet. There, their legacy is distorted, co-opted by obscure online political sects and Silicon Valley accelerationists.

Assume Form attempts to reconstruct what alchemized within the unit. Via the various influences and practices that entered their orbit, it reimagines this defining chapter of technological and cultural history. The exhibition frames the CCRU as the crystallization of its historical moment, tracking the landscape in which they operated from 1994 until the turn of the millennium. Taking cues from the same sources as the group——the landscapes, texts, sounds, and events that informed them and them——it creates the imagined space in which the ongoing resonances of this highly influential group begin assuming form.

0rphan Drift is an artist collective and avatar, formed in London in 1994. It is currently channeled through the artists Maggie Roberts and Ranu Mukherjee and previously was transmitted through many others including Suzanne Karakashian and Erle Stenberg. Its work, via video, performance, collage, text, and installation, explores a rapidly changing technological landscape and the implications of that landscape on both the human and the machinic body. This conversation took place in February 2026, on the occasion of the exhibition Assume Form, which is on view until May 24th at the Hessel Museum at Bard College. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Emily Nola (EN): Tell me about the beginning of 0rphan Drift. Where were you? What was the environment?

Maggie Roberts (MR): The project started when we were both teaching at Middlesex University in London. The other two members of 0rphan Drift in the ’90s and early 2000s, Suzanne Karakashian and Erle Stenberg, were both students there. We were all sort of searching for what to do next. We didn’t feel we had a place in the YBA [Young British Artists], goal-oriented, career art scene. We wanted to do something different.

Ranu Mukherjee (RM): I remember having conversations during my MFA where I was trying to talk about the feeling that everything was going to change because of the internet—which was just starting. And the response from some faculty was: Why aren’t you painting? Why are you talking about this? It was treated like an improper subject.

London was between gentrifications, and there were tons of empty spaces. We were offered a space on Underwood Street, and Maggie had been offered a show at Cabinet Gallery. She got back from a trip, and I remember saying, “I think we should just make a show that doesn’t have authorship, that is collectively made.” And you said, “I think my Cabinet show is going to be that, and I’ve been thinking about this word ‘orphan.’” So Maggie unpackaged that solo show and made it into this collective thing.

MR: Solo career wrecked!

RM: It was the beginning of sampling culture, too. We took that very seriously. The Cyberpositive book (1995) was sampled, as well as the photos from that first exhibition, and alot of the work at Underwood Street.1 That was a little different, but it was also reconfigurations of material and object.

MR: It’s pretty fun to talk about that piece—that’s Ariadne’s Gone Virtual (1995).

EN: I’ve been thinking a lot about that show. It’s one of my favorites from that early time. There’s a line in that text that reads: “Your identity must become mutable and hyperaware. Navigation through response.” When I talk about 0rphan Drift, I often talk about it as a feminist collective. It’s interesting that this show—which is oriented around the mythological figure Ariadne, this lineage of feminism—in the first or second sentence, there’s an unseating of that. How do you both think about this project in relation to feminism, or cyberfeminism—a term that had just been coined around that time? Did you think of this project as a feminist one?

RM: The influence was definitely there. At the end of my MFA, I found Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” and I was like, this is the missing piece. The white feminism that was “goddess” oriented felt problematic. Donna Haraway really broke that up for me. The Ariadne work was a way of putting that figure into a cyberfeminist context. I don’t know if we used that term then, but we were painting with that brush.

MR: For me, feminism—or, dismantling patriarchal assumptions—was definitely something I was thinking about. But I was thinking it through different kinds of temporalities and materialities, thinking in a way that is labyrinthine and fluid, and refuses to be fixed. It’s amazing, Ranu—I didn’t realize you had just read Haraway. That’s insane. That’s so contemporary of you. I think I was obsessed with [the novelist and filmmaker] Marguerite Duras and [the filmmaker] Andrei Tarkovsky.

RM: I mean, they were definitely there for me, too. And [filmmaker and theorist] Trinh T. Minh-ha … But the “earthy” feminisms felt really predatory to me. They were just picking things out of other cultures, some of which my family are part of. They took so much from that history and it bugged me; I couldn’t align with that. Cyberfeminism was a way of getting out of that grip.

EN: Most of the work being shown in Assume Form was also part of Syzygy (1999), your collaboration with the CCRU [Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, held at Beaconsfield Contemporary Art, London]. That was your only formal collaboration with them, but you were in conversation for much of the late ’90s. Can you tell me a little bit about how you first got involved with them, what that collaboration looked like?

MR: I first met [philosopher] Nick Land when he spoke at the Royal College of Art in London in 1992. He talked about science fiction and William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984), and I felt the way Ranu did about Haraway. Not about Nick, but about what I was being introduced to. Well, his thinking then as well, actually—but mostly the science-fiction space, how it was articulating incredible stuff: How it acted as a tool for rupture and recoding. So that was my introduction, and he also financially supported the Cyberpositive book.

RM: In those early days of 0rphan Drift, besides exhibiting, we were also working in clubs, doing visuals for music and performance lectures at institutions. They invited us to perform at Virtual Futures, which got us connected to that whole burgeoning thought bubble.2

MR: VNS Matrix stands out for me.

RM: Yeah, and Hari Kunzru was there, and Pat Cadigan, a big spectrum of people …

MR: Stelarc, Manuel DeLanda, and Sadie Plant, who was backing off a bit by that time … She did amazing talks around [what would become her book] Zeros and Ones (1997).3 Also, I think we did some sort of backing visuals and vocals for some Nick thing.

EN: For Meltdown (1994), right?4

MR: Meltdown, that’ll be it. But it was a slow burn—just staying in touch, lots of respect and mutual exploration. It took us a year to write the proposal for Syzygy. We were all into aspects of Mayan calendrics, but some of our other interests diverged. They were brilliant together, but if anyone asks me about the Numogram, I don’t know what to say—fourth-dimensional math is just not my thing, you know?

RM: The CCRU were numerology and mathematics based; we were interested in qualitative stuff that was based on cosmology. It feels to me like when we moved into production, the Numogram, hyperstition, and the different narratives that they came up with got really fleshed out for them, whereas we really fleshed out the video and the avatars.

MR: [CCRU members] Nick, Anna Greenspan, and Mark Fisher went to a hut in a forest in Canada to write. We, 0rphan Drift, were making the collages, videos, and soundtracks, and Steve Goodman [a.k.a. Kode9, a music producer and member of the CCRU] collaborated with us on sound. Suzanne Karakashian and [CCRU member] Suzanne Livingston made the icons for the twinnings together. And the Meshed Katacomic publication (1999)—which we were very excited about—we worked on all together. That was a disaster for CCRU, because it was illegible for them. We’re so used to reading fast-moving, disrupted video. So that’s what brought about the Abstract Culture: Digital Hyperstition pamphlet (1999), actually.5 There was a bit of extra money, so they used it to publish that. That’s what I remember. But what about you, Ranu?

RM: That’s right, because CCRU wanted more text in the Katacomic. It was based on the idea of a comic book or graphic novel, so having full pages of theoretical texts wasn’t right for the format. Part of it was also that their narrative was not ours. They had all this … very Lovecraft-inflected Cthulhu narrative, and we weren’t doing that. By the end of the project—which was interesting, because it was called Syzygy, and we really brought that on—by the end I felt like we were in this cosmological battle or something. I don’t know if we could adopt all of it—also I don’t think we understood all of it. I didn’t feel compelled to go in that direction.

EN: Yeah, it’s interesting, I think you both are alighting on what I’ve found through researching that period. Late ’98 to 2000 is a transition point for the CCRU. They move operations from the University of Warwick campus to Leamington Spa, and Sadie Plant’s initial influence starts dissipating. That’s when the Lovecraftian, occultic, conspiratorial thinking hits a fever pitch, and the work really changes.

MR: At that time, there was just this darkness around. Suzanne and I got a lot of inspiration for patterns and textures and footage for the videos from going to squat parties, and that went from being an amazing experience—obviously, it involved psychedelics—to all the sudden, people injecting and overdosing and dying. Suddenly, there was so much more heaviness present in London.

EN: Over the process of working on the show together, I’ve become curious as to what it’s been like to go back and spend time with this period of your life, of the collective’s life. What has it been like to look back? Or, does it even feel new?

MR: No, it doesn’t. I was saying to Ranu the other day: Why does everyone want our old work? There’s also this assumption that we “illustrated” the CCRU—an assumption made mostly by men of a certain age group. They keep writing to me, and they’ll say something that I just can’t stand, like—“Just one more question, did Nick Land write Cyberpositive?” I just kind of end up telling them to get lost. That’s not been great, and I’ve fielded a lot of that.

RM: Being in San Francisco and watching the tech stuff has been really disturbing. And I’ve had to reckon with—did we miss something that was coming? The word accelerationism wasn’t being used when we were part of this, and people don’t really understand that. Watching it all unfold right in front of my face was really … we’re still in it right now, and there’s another wave coming. It depends on which way AI goes and how AGI [artificial general intelligence] unfolds—but that debate is very close. It feels very close … I mean, anyone who’s aligned with Nick’s work now is a conspirator in desiring the full domination of AI over humans, over all life.

You know? That’s actually what some of the tech community is trying to do. It’s not even hidden anymore.6

EN: Well back then, in the ’90s, you hear Meltdown, you know, it’s fun, it’s cyberpunky. It’s science fiction about a speculative future. But now, that future is really coming to pass. So to continue to take it on as, like, an ideological rallying cry means something really different today than it did in 1994.

RM: Totally! You’re not standing outside politics. You’re directly influencing it now.

MR: But I think, Ranu, when you’re saying, “Did we miss something?” I don’t think we did. I have thought about this a lot. Back when Nick was writing Meltdown, I loved his word-crafting. Not that I understood everything, but I kind of don’t mind that. And then I heard slowly, incrementally, what he’d been doing [in the intervening years]. I suppose, to begin with, I thought: He’s always prescient. He moved to Shanghai because he was already talking about the rise of China, when no one else was thinking that was the future. There’s so much stuff that he was prescient about, and that sat alongside his Nietzschean-Bataillian nihilism okay for a bit. But then I suddenly started getting these little inklings of … he’s homophobic, he’s misogynist, he’s damning the entire Global South to disease and starvation. And I didn’t know what to make of any of it.

And that’s when I was asked to do an artist talk at Goldsmiths, at the University of London. I got asked whether I had publicly disowned Nick Land. And I said, no, I hadn’t. It was so extreme, and no one had a good plan. But out of all this has emerged Donald Trump, and it’s serious.

EN: Yeah, I mean you’re right, it is serious. But also, I think—I believe strongly that—to just disown and essentially cease to engage is also not the right answer. You know? To pretend like it’s not happening, or that it didn’t happen—it’s how we got to this point. So doing that clearly doesn’t work, and we need to find a different strategy than total disassociation and disengagement.

With all of the ambivalence that we’ve just talked about, it feels like the easiest option would be to not engage this history, not talk about this period of the work. I’m thinking specifically in the context of bringing it into Assume Form, into a new exhibition for current audiences—I’m curious, both personally and in a larger sense, why it feels like dealing with these histories is still important?

MR: We think about 0rphan Drift as an avatar: It’s a strange attractor that we channel. That feels real, still today. So I’ve decided that, instead of feeling frustrated, it’s about understanding 0rphan Drift as a continuum. We’re figuring out how we want to move forward in the current moment.

RM: It’s a story that’s not fully told. And the spectrum of possibilities when the computational technology first arrived was very multivalent. There was a lot of hopefulness and potential, as well as fear. We’re in another moment like that. I think our work was asking certain questions, and they are a part of an important conversation to continue to have. It’s also frustrating to not be able to talk about the work as it was. We were living in the moment, even though we were thinking about the future—because the future felt like it was happening in that moment. I think some of the ideas are still really important, but the work has not yet been fully understood. If the legacy of that time is just Nick Land and the CCRU, it’s very incomplete.

Originally published in the publication for Assume Form, designed by Eric Timothy Carlson. The exhibition is on view at the Hessel Museum at Bard College from April 4 - May 24, 2026. Find more information here.

Introduction

It feels like in the last couple years there have been a lot of glossy PR pieces telling us that the names we loved during the gritty early days of Web 2 are making a resurgence, that Post-Net is back on the cutting edge. In a real sense, the stars of Post-Net are back. The most interesting work in most biennials and museum shows can still often be determined by whether the artists behind it had anything to do with the DIS Berlinale. Brad Troemel and Josh Citarella are both separately influencers that have broken through to total normies; Avery Singer seems to be gearing up a press cycle for a 3rd show with Hauser and Wirth; Jon Rafman appears as the definitive voice for high/low-brow production of AI video work.

I personally came of age during the golden era of this movement, and the artists involved have been massive influences on my work and the work of my peers. To be very clear, I love Post-Internet art, and I am thrilled these people are all finally getting their much deserved shine. However, reading through the recent conversation on “Post-AI” art started by Avery Singer, I was struck by the feeling that it seemed to be the same heads dealing with things in a similar way, although with different input parameters. Where Post-Net 1.0 was defined by artists starting to grapple with the collapse of the divide between digital and physical into a causal and aesthetic unity, this renewed wave is more of the same classic critical twist in a new environment of realized Yarvin-style network control and platform ubiquity. New interrogations of identity and defense contracting juxtaposed with the possibility of infinite content.

There is a nascent movement of young artists that are dealing with reality and making work in a fundamentally different way: if Post-Internet art is art after the dissolution of the internet into the world, Hypermaterialist art is art that reckons with the ubiquity of intelligence in the material of the world itself, and how this self-consciousness dissolves into its own causal framework. When I refer to intelligence, I am not talking primarily about AI, or really about AI much at all. Instead I am thinking of artists who are interested in networks/non-human entities that have their own capacity for intention and spirit. More specifically, I am interested in categorizing the artists whose practices take this consciousness of reality as baked into the materials of their work.

In what follows I’ll try to briefly characterize the analytical framework for what Post-Net has gelled into as it has matured, will talk a bit about the aesthetic dialectics of the moment as I see them in a Kraussian style grid, and will try to situate a new movement that I have been calling Hypermaterialism against that backdrop.

After the Internet

It will be useful to give a quick rundown of what we mean when we talk about Post-Internet art. Obviously, these artists are not working within a monolithic framework, but what is given here is the broad strokes.

Post-Internet art is art made after the propagation of the internet. The internet, for a time, existed with power relations and causality that operated at different modes of complexity and non-linearity to the causal phenomena of pre-networked life. If modernism was arboreal, networks, specifically the widespread unoptimized networks of the late aughts, allowed for symbiogenesis. Post-Internet art sought to critique, use for content, and exploit those nonlinear relations as they became enmeshed with the phenomena of the rest of the world.

There were some aesthetic criteria for what constituted Post-Net. If the gallery PDF or instagram post was the object that drove commerce, interest, and validity in the world of fine art, why not embrace those domains and the aesthetics of digital spaces as primary material? Artie Vierkant (progenerator of the “image-object”), Petra Cortright, Pieter Schulwerth, Tabor Robak, Avery Singer, and countless others are examples in this domain. The side trend that accompanied and informed a lot of these aesthetics was the recycled early-internet pixelated GIFs, 3D matcap renders, and the digital holographics of vaporwave. Something that after the fact has been termed Fruitiger Aero, but a more fucked up version. My particular introduction to this aesthetic form was a Tumblr called lickycat run by someone named Bailey. There were thousands of Baileys. Photoshop and painting reached singularity. The author became dissolved or blurred unless the work needed to exist in a market. There was a lot of aesthetic overlap with memes.

The flex into branding was another popular move of the time. Just as institutional critique before it was a straight shot into the institution itself, work that engaged the platforms was potent on the platforms. The embrace of self-reflexive corporate aesthetics and “personal brand” are present in much of Post-Net but DIS, Amalia Ulman’s Excellences & Perfections, K-hole, Aids 3D, UV Production House are all examples of this thread within the conversation. Artists turned the mechanism of platforms and media back on themselves to interrogate ideas of increasingly atomized labor conditions. Ryan Trecartin invents the front facing camera. Social practice is just being Molly Soda.

Finally there was the absurd, disgusting, and beautiful “manmade horrors beyond our comprehension”. John Rafman’s sculptural work, weird images of food where it wasn’t supposed to be on the Jogging, Simon Denny’s Remainder series, Sean Raspet’s - 2012. I don’t think anyone made a work that was a compilation of ISIS beheadings with the snapchat cute dog filter, but they could have, and I might have cried.

All of these modes of aesthetics, of what the work actually looked like and did, had degrees of overlap. The potent and lasting conceptual framework that these aesthetics fell within is the collapse of media, life, and being into hyperstitional collage. The work collectively articulated the core of Post-Net’s ideological approach, conveying the alienation of a new modality of being as something glossy and disgusting and complicated. It was often post-studio, often produced in China, with low barriers to engagement. Looking back, it existed mostly as conversations between people trying to understand the self’s relation to a big mechanism that changed the basis of the economy, social life, and individuality. Post-Net saw the phenomena and complexity of the moment as emergent from the networks that were organizing everyday life; that networks revealed new properties of capital and social relations.

The approach often invoked blatant ironic distance, criticality, or collapse of sincerity into complexity. Every Post-Net artist worth their salt pissed someone off at some point because they were either making fun of something people liked or were perceived to be. A lot of the work was intentionally alienating, and while this is not a bad thing in itself, critically, the meat that made up the complexity of what these artists were trying to talk about sometimes outweighed the importance of the objects produced.

It is no coincidence that so many people involved in the movement have moved on to more didactic forms of media such as podcasting, video essays, and writing as primary modes of expression. Artie Vietkant just coauthored a book for Verso about Healthcare, Josh Citarella interviewed Fukayama, DIS is working as a consultancy, Rafman is a creative director, Seth Price is mostly known for his manuscripts, and Troemel is educating normies about economics and cultural theory. These artists in a real sense became what they were always destined to be. The self-reflexivity they used in thinking about the new ways of being in networks got integrated into the networks themselves. DIS totally redefined advertising, so the role of that self reflexivity collapsed into the function itself. Amalia Ulman made a narrative of herself in images so she became an autobiographical film maker. Simon Denny showed Metaverse paintings with Andreessen Horowitz at SXSW. Dan Keller became a stocks guy and seems to be doing well with it. Reality along with the capital forms of distribution and connection with which these artists were dealing were integrated back into the platforms themselves. The critique was metabolized in a way that had little effect on the superstructure it existed within. I will never forget hearing Kiernan Shipka claim in an interview that she was an anonymous meme admin.

Sculpture in the Expanded Field: Reloaded

In order to try and explain where aesthetics seem to be at the moment, I am going to attempt the hubristic task of constructing a grid like the one Rosalind Krauss puts forward in her seminal essay, Sculpture in the Expanded Field. I’ll start by explaining the two axes as I see them and then we will discuss what each of the quadrants entail and how they might exist aesthetically. These two axes have more to do with conditions of being at the moment than just the current modes of art being made, but there are parallels.

Emergence and Materialism

In a philosophical context, the idea of emergentism comes from an attempt to explain the “hard problem of consciousness” in philosophy of mind. The hard problem calls into question the idea that purely physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective, conscious experiences, or qualia. For example, let’s assume when I am subjected to a pain stimulus, “c-fibers” fire neuronal impulses up my spine into my brain resulting in me having the phenomenological experience “pain”. The mechanistic causal chain is definitely related to the conscious experience of pain, but it cannot explain the character of experience. The hard problem of consciousness asks: how could the unthinking processes of my body be metaphysically identical to the qualitative experience of pain?

Philosophers have taken different positions on this problem or ones similar to it through time, but essentially the answers fall into a couple camps. Dualism posits an entirely different substance, the soul, which is governed by different substantial relations than physical stuff. It is a relatively unpopular position for reasons I will not go into here. Reductive Physicalism, which emergentism falls within, is the assertion that subjective phenomena, or mental stuff, is in the end reducible to physical stuff. Panpsychism is the assertion that all stuff has mental properties, that consciousness is a persistent and fundamental feature of all of reality.

Historically, and I know this is sometimes surprising to a contemporary audience, panpsychist materialism was basically consensus within the philosophical community until the popularity of Logical Positivism came in the mid 20th century. Logical positivism claims that all things that are True are either true a priori, or are empirically verifiable. It attempts to end the question of metaphysics all together along strictly empirical lines. The movement was one of rigid analyticity, which socially coincided with the developing modernity of an industrial west. It is no mistake that the era of grand mechanistic narratives of the state and the moral imperatives of those bodies is one of arboreal and metallic relations to the mind and spirit. This is not intended as ethical argumentation for or against the positions, it is just to give some context on the cultural background of the school of thought.

Because the hard problem of consciousness is a real problem for the physicalist, a slew of explanations came about to make sense of mental events as rooted in a physical framework. Emergentism is the idea that physical stuff has properties which cannot be understood in the micro scale, but when observed at specific scales or configurations, begin to exhibit wholly novel properties. A good example of emergence is dots on a printing matrix of an image. There is nothing intrinsic to a dot of ink that enables it to represent Marilyn Monroe in a Warhol, but when organized appropriately, those dots of ink have the emergent property of representing Marilyn Monroe. Emergentism holds that consciousness is a property like this, which emerges from the mechanism of the body through the aggregation or abstraction of mechanical processes.

In contrast to emergence, panpsychist materialism bites the bullet on phenomenal experience and claims that at some level, all things have a form of phenomenal experience because consciousness is a fundamental property of all material. Phenomena and extension are two sides of the same coin. There is a “what it is like”-ness to all things.

There are different approaches, but it would not be off base to say that the panpsychist materialist would claim that electrons, societies, kidneys, people, and the universe all have their own form of experience. The Leibnizian view, which I am inexplicably fond of, holds that “my liver cells”, “my liver as a whole”, “my liver and the internet”, and “me including my liver and the internet” are all distinct minds with intention which literally inform reality through their interstitial relationships. It’s a weird position. More colloquial forms of panpsychist materialism might be your aunt talking about the intentionality of the universe.

To speak briefly about what is at stake between the materialist panpsychist approach and emergentism, emergentism gives us a basic explanation of why we have phenomenal experiences. It does not give us intentionality or a sort of governing set of psychic laws which would determine how phenomenal experience as a global property might have the causal force we might want it to. Both ways of understanding the properties of reality work across scales. The emergentist might say societal causation happens because certain scopes of the abstraction of certain types of matter have certain emergent properties. The panpsychist materialist might say a society has a mind of its own which exercises a top down effect on the matter it is composed of, while the matter it is made of fights back or coheres with its own intentionality.

For the sake of simplicity, I am going to refer to panpsychist materialism simply as materialism which I think will make more sense once we discuss the art that winds up fitting into each of these camps.

Absolute and Reflexive

While these concepts require less explication than emergence and materialism, they are worth describing for a minute. Reflexivity is to look at the state or narrative of reality as a plastic, but real, clear, and distinct thing. Reflexive approaches refer back to the thing itself in a feedback loop, where the mode of processing has an influence on reality. Its essence changes or clarifies when observed or interrogated. It relies on reality being in a constant state of becoming.

Absolute approaches take history, morality, beauty, and value to be things that have real and unchanging designations of properties. The absolute approach does not intrinsically assert that we know what those real referents of things like beauty and value are, but asserts that they may be discovered through a process of refinement where the goal posts stay roughly static.

The reflexive approach engages in a soft form of objectivity which is based around intersubjectivity in the constant clarification of the good, meaningful, or true, the absolute approach attempts to assert the state of universal properties and drive towards them. Reflexive approaches posit real, or causally effective, properties that instantiate in their discovery rather than the other way around.

Absolute Emergence: Neo-Modernism

I am not going to spend much time talking about the revival of modernist approaches. If you are reading this article, chances are you have seen the absolute glut of post-figurative painting and geometric abstraction which has been flooding the market. This work is a lot of what I mean when I talk about Neo-Modernism. The continued interest in identity based work and formalist art fits in this category. There is heavy focus on individual exceptionalism, the artists aren’t really asserting anything, and it mostly acts in the domain of process and therapy. Modernism in a real sense was the advent of subjectivity in our exploration of value. This new wave asserts that not only is value subjective, it is absolutely subjective; that there is nothing there beneath the skin; that social construction is all there is, but it does not point to some property and it’s not causal. It is an axiological nihilism of sorts with respect to what art is capable of. The Neo-Modernist approach to value is that the emergent property of what makes a work good is that it’s called good, subjectivity, market effects, and all. It is the anesthetist of critique and conceptual redefinition as a power of aesthetic meaning. Read a review of any of this stuff and you would be hard pressed to find a single thing that the work is doing other than being a singular art object.

This all sounds extremely negative, but to be totally honest, I actually really like a lot of this work. It's often fun, pretty often well executed, it feels personal to look at. If it does have some end to it, it just makes me love the world I experience everyday more, probably because I exist in a similar subjectivity and milieu as a lot of the people making it. Joe Speier, Shelley Uckotter, and Abby Lloyd are three of my favorite artists and they fit firmly into this category. There is some goofy deflationary conceptualism like Darren Bader’s show that was just up at Matthew Brown that fits in as well. Any sculptor that talks about liminal space fits in here. Experimental abstract photography, abject beauty, new art that looks like shit that would make sense at Dia Beacon, put it straight into my veins.

There are a lot of examples of this done poorly as well. If you have seen a show at a vanity gallery in Chelsea, 9 times out of 10 it fits squarely into this category of an artist doing things a little bit differently but often winding up with a painting that makes sense in the tradition of a lot of other paintings from modernism, but less well executed, and maybe just not that interesting to look at.

Absolute Materialism: Return

If you are reading this article you are also no doubt familiar with the “return to tradition” that seems to be rampant in culture, maybe more so than in art. I think this stuff has always sort of existed, but the thrust of the conceptual approach is: there is a distinct telos to value, and that telos is materializing the will of God by reflecting immanence. I think in this category, there are those that definitely believe they understand what it would mean to reflect the will of the divine in objects, and others who just strive to get closer to something out of reach. This work is often grand in scale and relies on extreme levels of labor and technical skill to actualize. There are probably 50,000 people on earth now who can paint as well as Vermeer or sculpt like Michelangelo, and if I could too, maybe I would be satisfied for that to be the end of aesthetics.

The bad versions of this work are things like Daniel Arsham, the African Mahogany KAWS at the Brooklyn Museum, or hyperrealist-baroque and renaissance revival. I feel like when I think of it, in my mind I can almost taste the hustle-preneur flavored instagram reel that accompanies its “grand creation” status. It's got all the gloss, it's EPIC, but it fails to transcend because I just don't buy it being all there is. The best version is work like Ivana Bašić’s which is ambitious, spiritual, and truly transcends without needing to complicate the purity of the aesthetics with criticality or concepts at all. Koons, even with all his PoMo tendencies – when you are staring at a 20 foot tall mirror polished bronze of a deer being hunted by a dog, hits in much the same way. I could care less about how lazy the paintings are. We all know why we are really there.

Functional “sacred small pleasures” or “fewer better things” style craft fits in here, maybe even the rash of realistic airbrush on canvas stuff we’ve seen pop back up in the past few years. I think there is a place here for burner art and stuff about crystals where the art is just a really big cool crystal. It all is trying to get to a glorification of the one true spirit of reality, either the subtlety or the whole of it, there are just a lot of different ideas of what that spirit is. It is often, by necessity, not that self aware. Most of the bad end of it reminds me of the song Comfort Eagle by Cake. The good end reminds me to never forget to truly believe.

Reflexive Emergence: Post-Net

Because I have already spoken at length about Post-Net, I’ll just discuss here how it fits into the grid and the critical limitations I see as bracketing the movement from other contemporary work. Also, I should just state that there is other work that fits into this quadrant, but because Post-Net is in the zeitgeist again, I’m going to use that as the example. There are also new artists making work in this category, I think of Maya Man as the most prevalent example. In terms of lesser known people, I really like Morry Kolman’s and Kayla Drzewicki’s work. School for Poetic Computation, Rhizome, Maya’s space Heart, all seem to foster the new gen of this approach and seem to be adding a fun posi-core spin to things.

Post-Net’s aesthetic innovation was using self-reflexivity to determine and hyperstition the aesthetics of the new face of power relations. Of course there were modes of art making that influenced the modes of production it engaged with in a broader sense before, but the aesthetics of Post-Net became the exact aesthetics of the networks it was looking to critique. It was the first truly successful self-reflexive movement in that it became fully hegemonic. Minimalism in its time was similar but it was guided by industry much more so than Post-Net which seemed to work more in lock step.

The aspect of Post-Net that is in some instances a feature and in some instances a bug is its approach to the properties and effects in the world it attempts to make work about. If we treat the properties of contemporary connectivity as fundamentally emergent, the only thing that can really be done with them is a form of intensification, future casting, or critique that is necessarily ineffective. In some ways Post-Net was genuinely clarifying. It often coherently linked new forms of connectivity with the underlying political power structures that they emerged from. But in the end a lot of it was like pointing out that two trains were about to collide where success of the art hinged on the moment of collision. Simon Denny’s show The Founders Paradox, was a great show, but the fact that Peter Thiel loved it is a massive part of the work’s own historicization and in no small part is what makes it exceptionally meaningful to look back on. Ryan Trecartin’s early use of the extreme self and panoptic self-surveillance are things that, while visionary, are now essentially not any more shocking or different than looking at any influencer with over a million followers. Part of the struggle with emergence as an analytical tact is that the work can be metabolized fully into the power structures it critiques because it is just an intensification rather than something that pushes into the new. Post-Net allows for the aesthetic/spiritual in its criticality but in my own experience it fails to reach for transcendence. It is about pushing in, deconstruction, and definition of the stuff already in the world, rather than pushing through.

Reflexive Materialism: Hypermaterialism

The fundamental conceptual assertion of Hypermaterialism is that by complicating aesthetic, material, and referential relations we can push through the mundanity and eternal return of reality; through aesthetics, we can generate something which possesses novel phenomenal experience and causality. It is the belief that art can actually transcend, and rather than act predictively, it can steer reality in non-linear ways; that when I see the eyes of God in the mud and pain of the moment, I can have an experience akin to seeing a new spectrum of color. Hypermaterialist art attempts to create aesthetic experience that integrates the intentionality of conscious materials as authors in the work.

I do not believe that art will swoop in and save us per se, merely that it is not just determined by history and is a component in the causal chains of the process of history. There is not necessarily an ethical dimension to a lot of this work, just an imperative of engaging in the process of history as an active participant. History works in a modality of competing narratives which act dialectically and eventually are transcended. Rather than there being a simple linear progression, there is a series of states of movement, almost like writhing, and stepwise functions between them.

To break down the conjecture more completely:

(1) There is a state of history which is composed of the internal contradictions between the dominant narratives of the time and the information of the world, dialectics.

(2) The information of the world is non-conceptual content.

(3) Through aesthetic or preconceptual processes, that information can be metabolized into phenomenal objects which clarify the dialectics of the moment. This information, as turned into aesthetics, is inherently alienating from the hegemonic narratives of the moment. In other words, the bracketing of the world through aesthetics creates new phenomena which complicate history, preconceptually.

(4) Abstract concepts and new aesthetic expressions are formed reflexively, in a feedback loop, to define the new aesthetic and non-conceptual material of reality. The bracketing of the world through conceptualization of aesthetics creates new narratives which complicate history, conceptually.

(5) Those concepts, integrated into the narratives of history, dissolve or make incoherent the contradictions of dominant narratives and generate new contradictions leading to a new dialectical moment.

(6) This happens within all intersubjectivities across scales and is the essence of history itself.

To extrapolate a bit, this means that the information of the moment, its aesthetic expressions, and its conceptual abstraction are all causal, intersubjective, and phenomenal. There are qualia to these dialectical moments and the materials of them.

Examples of this line of thinking in contemporary theory are bountiful. Bratton’s The Stack is probably the seminal text of contemporary panpsychist materialism that integrates the self-reflexivity of the world in its own determination. Cyclonopedia can be read as non-fiction. Latour’s Actor-Network Theory is essentially Leibniz revived for the modern constructivist approach. Harman’s Object Oriented Ontology, and specifically Morton’s expansion on the idea of Hyperobjects and “realist magic”, outlines in a very direct way what this nascent movement in art is concerned with. All of these theoretical approaches have their own flavor but they are unified in their understanding of self-reflexiveness of phenomenal states in the world and those phenomenal states’ pervasiveness.

So what does it mean for an artist to make work that is aligned with conscious materials and reflexive definition of the world? I believe this is actually a much more traditional way of making art than many of the other approaches already discussed. The work of medieval devotional object making and architecture were using the new narrative causal structures of the time to create things that influenced and acted reflexively with those narrative structures. The cult of saints, and the devotional objects that embodied it, is an obvious example. Saints were in a sense hyperobjects themselves, being the sum total of the ways they shaped society rather than just masses of flesh and bone. The same is true for moments within early modernism where aesthetics was acting in a symbiotic process with the determination of material reality surrounding industrialization and mass production.

Similarly, Hypermaterialist art aims to use the objects of contemporary reality, objects with complicated qualitative states and instantiations, to make work reflexively with those complicated structures. It aims to make things that metabolize into new narratives of history rather than just intensifications of what already exists. Finally, it aims to act squarely in the domain of aesthetic experience. It is a raising of the complicated hypermaterials, that reality is now undeniably composed of, into the spiritual and causal domain.

Most Hypermaterialist art is in the domain of sculpture and “new media”. Materials lists are often complicated and long. Many are working in process based approaches where the movement through the network of production is much of the content of the work itself. Filip Kostic’s term “content collapse” is an extremely useful term for understanding this nascent movement and the non-physical nature of the materials much of this work is made with. Thanos in Fortnite at the MLK Memorial virtual museum is a hypermaterial. Thinking of some of these things as physically instantiated (the internet is a series of tubes and server racks) is sometimes useful. But dealing with them as materials through the primary media of qualia is a common tact that Hypermaterialist art takes. In other words, pieces of content, the outputs of networks, phenomenal abstractions, and their nonlinear instantiation is literally what many of these works are made of.

Complicity with Conscious Materials

Much of the impetus for writing this text comes from my own desire to place the work I am making in the context I see it and my peers generating together. I think of the work I’ve made so far, the piece Infinite Pain from this past year which simulated a C.Elegans connectome experiencing constant pain stimulus is probably the best example from my own practice in this domain.

To speak of some other examples, Filip Kostic’s Fortnite 007 Merciful Angel constructs a counterfactual narrative of personal and geopolitical history of the NATO campaign in Serbia in the 90s within a bootleg of Fortnite. IP expropriation and political circumstance until something new and spiritually meaningful flows out of it. Isabelle Frances McGuire's works using game material, low pop, and robots fit perfectly alongside it.

Andre Magana’s works recreating industrial mold tooling show a reflexivity of information and the wealth of generation that is available in the data of the world. His Blackspot series of expropriated complaint images of Samsung commercial display units deal with climate, technology and bureaucracy in ways that are both a whistle blow and abstract image making. Ellis and Parker Von Sternberg’s New Works show at Kings Leap uses crime scene photos of concealed corpses and a convoluted frame shop order process as materials. Legal contracts make up half of the work. The glitter shrinkwrapped human remains in the basement of the space invoke a very “is it real?” feeling until you are left realizing “it's all real”, and it doesn't really matter either way.

Karyn Nakamura’s AI and optical tweezer stop-motion installation Surface Tension shows the drama of imaging and its extensibility, literally turning dead neurons into hands that reach across the network for connection. It’s loud and weird aesthetically, I have no idea what it makes me feel but it’s beautiful. Brian Oakes’ physically instantiated random number generator that was the centerpiece of their exhibition Seed last year stands to make concrete the random generation that enables all networks and computers to be able to run. I have it on good authority that they’re trying to make opals in their kitchen and just figured out how to print their name in rubies. Colleen Hargaden’s Anthropogenic Mineral Collection publication uses quantification and categorization as a way of giving mass to the interconnectedness and effectiveness at a geologic level to crystal formation.

Greg Carideo’s work, generating miniature scale hybrids between awnings and cathedrals from the detritus of rotting found steel, cotton, and shoe heels. It reminds me more than any work I’ve seen of the Jordan Peterson quote “there are cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see” while gazing over a refracting Evian bottle. The specificity is so important in the work but it also feels unknowably dense, like the same specificity exists in everything. Harry Gould Harvey IV uses a similar divinity in the work, using specific detritus from rapidly deindustrialized Fall River factories to create the literal framing devices for work that looks in between Quaker friendship drawings and kabbalah. Clare Koury turned a room into a microphone to listen to the Schulman Resonance of earth, the work also seemed, to some extent, to be about the copper market and copper as an alchemical material. In a similar vein Rachel Rosheger is dealing with copper, the history of its production and alchemical power in ways that link HVAC systems and perpetual motion. These four, more than most others in this group, exemplify the ‘realist magic’ which Hypermaterialism hopes to embody.

I don’t know who to group Mark Fingerhut with exactly because the work is so goddamn innovative. Spiritual computer viruses that turn your machine into a conversation partner that he uses to pour his heart out about relationships, pain, love, and the contemporary condition of alienation, Jesus Christ. If you have a Windows computer and you have not run Goblin.exe I literally can’t think of a better art experience to spend 15 minutes with. Though on a totally different part of the spectrum, the hyper-collage of Crisis Acting, an anonymous video artist, is one of the more affirming and expansive artistic presences I can think of. I am particularly taken by their video rendition of The Waters Of March which is probably the prime example of content as material. Both works make me feel similarly.

Joseph Greer’s collage of natural-industrial parity feels like constructivist sacred geometry in a good way, like he’s actively courting making paintings in space for the Demiurge. Rachel Jackson and Brandon Bandy’s recent exhibition making hydrodipped, printed, mangled wood components in a woodpaneled basement seemed to engage in this form of material reflexivity. The exhibition they put on titled Network Spirituality after the Milady “I long for a Network Spirituality” motto pretty much sums up and puts a pin on the total of what I am trying to describe.

I could go on and on but the point is that there are dense threads to this idea that laid latent for a long time. Almost all of these artists are under 35, there are maybe only a handful of cases where any production of the actual work is outsourced (and even in those cases that is often the point), and they all engage in the hypermaterials that dictate the spiritual and conscious flow of our time.

Transcending the Edge

I want to finish this out with a few quick points. The first is very quick: I live in NYC and it is for that reason alone that this list is geographically centered on NYC. This is what I see happening around me, but I’m sure it is happening elsewhere in slightly different flavors and modalities. Write about the examples or counterexamples, I’d love to see them, send me a link when it’s published.

Second, I want to acknowledge that there are obviously edge cases to consider. So it is in the complicated forward march of history. There is a cluster of artists that were around during Post-Net but feel closer to Hypermaterialism in some ways. Agnieszka Kurant, Rachel Rossin, Anthony Discenza, Trevor Paglen, some of Simon Denny’s new work, there are more. These people feel on the edge of embracing information in a new way, but a lot of the aesthetics and conversations wind up gelling with Post-Net more so than the new movement. Some of them are more on the post-studio end of things, some not, they also have just been in the game longer, they all give seriously good artist talks. I’m not totally sure but it feels like a meaningful cluster to identify. I’m sure there are other edge cases in the diagram as well but they just aren’t as clear to me.

Finally, I want to say briefly what Hypermaterialism means to me, on an emotive or personal level. We are in a moment where the stagnant pain of neoliberalism and imperialism invades every moment of our being. When I look into the world, I constantly see infinite suffering reflected back through genocide, poverty, hunger, and inequality. In a linear sense, I have no idea what to do about it. I cannot stop the murder of children by saying stop or through protest or voting. I cannot solve the growing problems of addiction and despair from a broken healthcare and financial system. I cannot donate money I do not have to everyone destabilized, or make it so that the rent stops being due to corporate structures more powerful and emboldened than we have ever seen. It feels more difficult than ever to heal the pain of the world even in small ways.

But still, I wake up every morning, and all the complexity and tension of reality washes over me and in the mottle of their colors I see and experience beauty and God in them. In the tears, and in the acid rain that washes them away, is a new spectrum of color that blurs with me like we are films in a dance of crossfade. It is inexpressible as words. My goal, and if I can be so bold, the goal of Hypermaterialism, is not to make sense of the pain of the world or ameliorate it through linearity. It is not to tell the world to change from a distance and watch it follow commands. It is to help the world transcend by showing it the beauty within it until it becomes so saturated that it begins to show through the skin. That the world, the things of it, and I, all of us, can decide together to be different, to make something closer, until the suffering fades and changes into something different and horrifying and beautiful in new ways.

An excerpt of this text was published in the 2026 Whitney Biennial Catalog.

This interview was conducted in June of 2025. We discuss themes explored in an article later published by Kline in October #195: “New York Real Estate and the Ruin of American Art”.

Joshua Citarella: In September of 2013, you [Josh Kline] opened a solo exhibition at the lower east side gallery 47 Canal titled “Quality of Life”. That same week, I had my first solo show on view at Higher Pictures on the upper east side. We spent the day visiting each other’s shows, talking about art and that strange moment of creative life in New York city.

My young peer group of post-internet artists were very much inspired by the ‘older classmen’ around 47 Canal, artists like Michele Abeles, Anicka Yi, Stewart Uoo, Alisa Baremboym and others. This generation of artists rejected the “post-internet” label and so it felt like there was a clear distinction of age and media paradigm. Influential exhibitions like “ProBio” at MoMA PS1, which you curated earlier that year, gave my generation something to aspire to, with important works by Dis, Tabor Robak, Antoine Catala, Ajay Kurian, Shanzhai Biennial, Georgia Sagri, Carissa Rodriguez, Ian Cheng and more.

In “ProBio”, Dis showed a video titled “Emerging Artist”, that addressed the topic of a new generation. It felt like there was a proverbial passing of the torch between generations and shared set of values that we might carry forward. Around that same time, Susanne Pfeffer’s famous exhibition “Speculations on Anonymous Materials” at the Fridericianum, linked these generational discourses by including artists like Katja Novitskova, Daniel Keller, Simon Denny, Timur Si Qin, Aleksandra Domanovic, Oliver Laric and many others.

In this period, anything and everything felt possible. We didn’t know it at the time, but creative life was about to change. Soon, social media and real estate would massively transform the culture and economics surrounding art.

So, Josh Kline, your path starting out during the 2000’s, was vastly different from mine in the 2010’s. And today, in the 2020’s, the young artists that publish their work to Do Not Research, will likely take an even stranger route.

To begin, I wonder if you could tell us what it was like starting out in New York when you did? Maybe it will help us trace how we got to where we are and what exactly has changed for this new decade of artists?

Josh Kline: My peers and I were reacting against the art and the art world of the 2000s. Most of the doors into New York’s art world were through pedigreed MFA programs at Columbia, Yale, Bard; through West Chelsea’s galleries; and through the Whitney Biennial and Greater New York. The curators of these museum surveys would pick up artists from summer group shows at Chelsea galleries or MFA thesis shows or open studios. Likewise, New York gallerists scouting for young talent would search the same MFA events and those two museum surveys. If you were starting out and your work wasn’t in one of these places, it was almost impossible to catch a break. I was working as a video art curator. Anicka Yi was working as a bookkeeper. Margaret Lee and Antoine Catala were artist assistants. We didn’t have rich parents or MFAs and no one would show the work we were making.

After the Financial Crisis, there was suddenly a lot of empty real estate in Manhattan. A few artists—like Margaret Lee—found ways to get access to it. In the winter of 2009, Margaret was throwing parties in an abandoned jewelry showroom at 179 Canal Street, two floors down from a studio she rented to do work for Cindy Sherman. Anicka Yi, who I was collaborating with at the time, called me one day and said that Margaret might be open to letting us use the space for video or photo shoots or other projects. I pitched Margaret a 3-day group show which would include work by my peers—a bunch of experimental weirdos. Since it was a rough project space, all the rules about who could and couldn’t be shown and schools, etc. went out the window. I included my own work alongside works by Margaret, Anicka, Antoine, as well as Trevor Shimizu, Amy Yao, Alisa Baremboym (and others) - who would later become the core of 47 Canal’s early program. The show, which opened on May Day in 2009 at 179 Canal, was titled Nobodies New York. The show inspired Margaret to do a whole month of programming, which later became a year of projects and shows. A bunch of people ended up taking studios in the building along the way - including Michelle Abeles, Gloria Maximo from Yemenwed, Mieko Meguro, among others. The first time I ever made an installation was at 179 Canal.

I was in my 20s in the 2000s. At the time, I remember thinking that the art world was incredibly conservative. So much of the art that was in favor was focused on the past, reinhabiting or reenacting various moments from 20th Century modernism–minimalism, German expressionism, various flavors of abstraction and conceptual art, Warhol in the age of the world wide web, etc. (all while ignoring the wars that America was prosecuting in the Middle East). At the time, we wanted to make a break from that kind of art as well - to carve out space for new forms, new materials, new ideas about what art could be in the 21st Century. It’s weird to be writing this now—the Contemporary Art shown in American galleries in the 2020s feels even more conservative than what was going on in the 2000s.

JC: I find myself in a position where I’m talking to a lot of young artists and creatives. While the legacy art world has become more conservative, there are many para-institutional projects that are alive in the social media space right now. Many of these projects begin as criticisms of the established institutions. Inevitably, the question arises: “what is the thing that you actually like?” What is the work that you want to canonize or the work that you feel like you’re in conversation with? So I’ve made a concerted effort to try and construct a lineage of shared values, aesthetics and ideas.

Was there a generation that you looked up to when you started out?

JK: Sort of. But also maybe not? I worked as a video art curator at Electronic Arts Intermix for 10 years and was heavily influenced by the artists I worked with there, especially people like Dan Graham, Michael Smith, Carolee Schneemann, Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, Dara Birnbaum, among others. But when I was starting out as an artist in the late 2000s, and even in the very early 2010s, with very few notable exceptions, the art world was fixated on the art of the past. Other artists at the time had to justify their work in relation to art history and art in the canon.

Working at EAI made clear to me just how much those artists that I admired had been focused on their own present when they made their breakthrough work in the sixties and the seventies. The work happening in that present mattered to them as much as, or even more than, what had happened before. That didn’t feel like it was the case in the late 2000s. What I wanted was the same agency that those artists had. I felt like our present, in the 2000s, had as much potential to generate radical new ideas as that “golden age.”

Coming at it from that perspective, the artists who had the greatest impact on my work, and my thinking about what art could be, were my peers: Anicka Yi, Antoine Catala, Darren Bader, Margaret Lee, Georgia Sagri, Dis, A.K. Burns, Trevor Shimizu, Stewart Uoo, Ajay Kurian, Yemenwed. In a way, it felt like we were all developing something together. There were also other artists around my age who I wasn’t in direct dialogue with like Ryan Trecartin, Trisha Baga, or Simon Denny. Just realizing—do you know Yemenwed’s work?

JC: No! The others I do, but not this one.

JK: They came before Dis—out of the same scene. Maybe they were the first of the new NYC collectives in the late 2000s who were dealing with contemporary aesthetics in New York. Along with Ryan Trecartin and Circular File, the collective I was part of with Anicka Yi and Jon Santos, they were some of the first artists to abandon ship on retro art. Just like with DIS, Yemenwed’s members worked at dayjobs in fashion, advertising, architecture and design and used their professional skills in their performances and videos.

JC: It’s an interesting way to look at it. In the sixties and seventies, artists were relatively free from the canon and they were making work that responded to the moment. Comparatively in the 2020s artists are indebted to the canon. This is especially pronounced now. I’ve run project spaces that have literally paid to rent works by canonical artists from the institutions.

JK: Wow.

JC: There’s a direct financial relationship, not just a metaphor there. Perhaps, instead of focusing on the canon, was there someone who was a contemporary of yours, but was maybe just a few years older? Perhaps someone that you could conceivably exhibit work alongside in the same group show?

JK: Now there are plenty of older artists I’d be excited to be in dialogue with in exhibitions. When I was younger, I would have said, “no”. We were reacting against the previous generation. We were also reacting against a really segregated, white art world. Most of 47 Canal’s roster was made up of Asian Americans and immigrants. Until Margaret walked away from her role there, it was an Asian-American-run gallery.

JC: At the 179 Canal project space, if I recall correctly, there was an implicit cooperative model where, if artists wanted to have their show open on the weekend, they would have to personally sit at the gallery to keep the doors open.

JK: That’s right.

JC: Incredible. Could you explain some of the ways that space worked? I think that’s a fascinating example of how to bootstrap a young creative scene.

JK: It was Margaret’s project space, but everyone who was involved brought a lot of energy and ideas into that space. Anicka and I brought our own communities and combined them with Margaret’s. People would gallery-sit their own shows and sometimes each other’s shows because Margaret couldn’t be there on the weekend all the time. It was a lot of work for her and we recognized that. So we wanted to pitch in. We would help each other and pack up art. We would pitch in with painting the walls. It really was this fleeting, utopian moment for all of us before 179 Canal became a commercial gallery.

JC: You mentioned the artist Ryan Trecartin before. I always think of Trecartin’s work as a powerful example of how the art world used to lead culture in that period. Today, if you look at TikTok or YouTube, Ryan Trecartin had anticipated that style with incredible foresight 10-15 years early. But something new has happened. It now feels like social media is leading culture and the artworld merely responds to it.

For example, the memes that are produced by the White House have a tremendous effect on what we talk about as a society. Today, these images have a much greater impact than anything shown in an art gallery. One of the ways of understanding the past few years is that, after social media, the culture we started to produce became more so “the discourse” than discrete art objects. I think this is part of how I find myself here, making a video podcast, today. Social media had the effect of turning all the lectures and panel discussions around art into “content”. On the podcast, I find myself discussing many of the topics that I used to explore in the artworld.

Back in 2013, PS1 hosted several left accelerationist speakers, including Nick Srnicek, in a program titled “Dark Optimism” organized by Triple Canopy. At the same time, in another part of the museum, you curated the highly influential art exhibition “ProBio” at that same institution. This felt like a thriving and exciting period of contemporary art where bold new ideas demanded urgent discussion.

Soon after, the internet picked up the themes of left accelerationism and transformed them into hyperbolic memes like “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” or even “Fully Automated Gay Space Communism”. In the years following, these hyperbolic “e-deology” labels began to emerge from the internet itself and then trickle into the institution. Somewhere around 2015 or 2016, the flow reversed. We stopped looking to art to find new ideas and instead began browsing online. As my friend “Lil’ Internet” from the New Models podcast likes to say; “We used to upload our lives to the internet. Now we download our lives from the internet.”

As a young person, the art that I admired always had a good conversation or a lecture around it. Today, I will literally repeat sentences or quotes that I first heard in the context of the artworld. Now, I relay these ideas to a popular audience that exists outside the institution. Before the takeover of big social media platforms, can you recap what the art world was like? Was there more or less discourse at that time?

JK: Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch were the first American artists who made a break with the retro-art and retro-culture of the 2000s and engaged with the vernacular of the present. Seeing them make that breakthrough was a revelation. It opened up so many possibilities.

What was the art world like before social media? The internet wasn’t a cool space for art in the 2000s. It wasn’t a space for serious dialogue. Unless you were Cory Arcangel or Paper Rad—who were explicitly making work on the web—it wasn’t cool to have a website as an artist. That was something that was kind of looked down upon. It felt like you were trying too hard. Maybe you would post a flyer for your opening. But you wouldn’t post images of the work.

The scene I was part of didn’t care about the circulation of art online as images. That wasn’t what we were trying to do, even the artists who were working with photography. It was really about the experience of these artworks in space, about installation, about things that you would have to smell or be in a room with, things that can’t be captured by images.

I think social media is one of the main reasons that the art industry has become so focused on painting and other handmade forms of art. The glut of spam, slop, memes, etc, has cheapened the image and conceptual gestures. We’re awash in these things now.

The amount of discourse has remained the same or maybe increased—there’s so much more content about art circulating online, but the quality of it has declined overall.

JC: Around 2010, my longtime friend and collaborator, Brad Troemel, would give a lecture about peer-to-peer networks. In this talk, he would contextualize the internet as a new stage of teleology. My peer group saw the internet not just as a communication network but as a profoundly new method of organizing society. Rather than dismissing social media as a novelty, it was something that we should think about in a very serious way. Today, 15 years later, I still feel that way but without any of the optimism that I had back in 2010. This transformation has been realized in mostly the worst way possible and its effects have largely been disastrous.

On this topic of teleology, the internet quickly transcended its initial role as a simple communication network. Through long discussions in peer organized reading groups at the time, I began to understand the internet as the early digital infrastructure for neoliberalism. Platforms offered the possibility to create transnational or non-contiguous societies linked together through markets. All of this was hard coded into their design.

Soon after, these online marketplaces began to disintermediate all aspects of creative industries, Spotify is a great example here. You said before that formal concerns now dominate discourse in the art world. Before social media, I understood the artist lecture and the art object as being bundled together. There would be really interesting stories and philosophies that would make the argument about why a particular object on the wall was important. The artist lecture created the value and that value was held in the artwork as a token object.

After social media, those two things were disintermediated or de-bundled. Platforms found a way to remove gatekeepers and to optimize separate markets for art discourse and art objects. Now artists have a dedicated outlet for conversations, such as podcasting, while artworks have become purely formal and serve a separate audience. What we used to say in museums, we now say on Substack. As a result, art objects started to do something different. Did the artworld as a whole benefit from this earlier model of gatekeepers? Or has this disintermediation been a net benefit to art?

JK: I don’t think gatekeepers were enforcing that earlier paradigm you’re describing. It’s just the way that everybody was working. I knew Seth Price when he was at the beginning of his career. We were both working at EAI. Nobody forced him to write Dispersion.

JC: “Dispersion” was a key text for our generation. We read that in a lot of reading groups.

JK: Seth was influenced by this earlier generation of artists that were at EAI. He was following the model of people like Bruce Nauman or Dan Graham. The work those artists made was conceptual and this went hand in hand with writing. These artists were a massive influence on me as well. It’s less about gatekeeping and more about a different approach to art-making where you’re working out your ideas through writing. The writing helps you develop the concepts that power the artwork. But it wasn’t a requirement that you had to write in order to have a career.

The economics of New York City were different at the time. Those economics allowed for lower prices for art. It allowed for lower overhead for galleries and more experimental art in those spaces. You had much more experimental and adventurous collectors from an earlier generation. They had come of age with art from the sixties, the seventies, etc, and were interested in conceptual art and conceptual gestures. In general, there was more rigor around collecting and it was more of an intellectual pursuit. This has definitely changed. Recently, Gavin Brown spoke at the Seaport Talks at TJ Byrnes about how those collectors have been shut out because of the increase in prices and the change in the economics around art.

But there are still artists who write. You all are still writing. It’s just that there’s no longer space within the commercial side of the American art industry for artists like you. Unless you figure out how to merge your ideas with painting.

JC: I’ve failed to do that for the past 10 years.

JK: Me too.

JC: One of the things that you and I have discussed a lot in the last year or so, which is explored in a piece you wrote for October, is the rising cost of living and rent in New York City. This has had a major impact onto art. Maybe we could summarize a few key points of that essay to contextualize some of the things we’re talking about here.

JK: There are two main ideas in the essay (which I unpack in much more detail). The first is that New York real estate and the cost of doing business here–which includes the cost of living in New York City–have pushed American art into a deeply, deeply conservative space after the pandemic. The second point, which leads back to the first, is that the structure of the American art industry forces most American artists to be present in New York in order to start and then to maintain an art career. All the gatekeepers are here. And they’re deeply lazy about doing studio visits in smaller American cities. There are a few exceptions that prove the rule, but as an American artist, if you’re not in New York, it’s been very difficult to start a career.

JC: I’ve participated in a few different think-tank projects around this very problem. The two solutions that come up, which I think are still meager and ill-fitted, is that (1) museums allocate bigger budgets specifically for travel to create a more geographically diverse survey of what “American art” could be or (2) there is some type of institutional funding that directly subsidizes the cost of making art in these major metropolitan cities. This would need to vastly bring down or eliminate the cost of artist’s studio space. This doesn’t directly alleviate rent and all of the other economic pressures. The question that’s implicit here is: Can the art sphere itself address this crisis? Or is that something that needs to be solved in the realm of politics?

JK: I think it’s time for more radical solutions. Some of these are absolutely political-- we all need to fight politically for a fairer economic system. But I also think that artists could solve many of these problems by abandoning New York City and its art institutions. They can build their own art worlds in spaces where real estate and living space are more accessible and more affordable. This would allow them to claim the same kind of space, time and agency that boomer artists had in the sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties in New York. Artists need to go to places where they don’t have to work so hard to support themselves, and where they can make work in opposition to the institutions and the market.

The institutions are not really a space for Gen X or Millennial artists. The art world was much smaller in the “golden age” back in the sixties or seventies. Much, much smaller. All of the now canonical boomer artists were able to have institutional shows at much younger ages than American artists working today. There were more exhibition slots for them in the institutions and in the galleries than there are today. Most of the slots in institutions are still being taken up by boomers. And this is true of the rosters and exhibition schedules of the bigger commercial galleries as well. I’m one of the few artists of my cohort who has had a mid-career survey at a major American institution.

Boomer artists, curators, and collectors built their own institutions in New York and those institutions championed their art. PS1, Artists Space, Dia, The Kitchen, White Columns, even Electronic Arts Intermix where I worked. These are all products of the seventies. When I think about the potential institutions founded in the 2010s in New York, Triple Canopy might be the last one standing. None of our artist-run project spaces were able to turn into institutions. When was the last major art museum founded in New York? The New Museum was founded in 1977.

I don’t know if the current system will really ever offer that much to younger generations of artists. I think it might be time for the ones who don’t just want to make paintings to abandon ship and accept that what happened financially for artists in the nineties, and maybe even in the 2000s, is not going to be possible for American artists who want to experiment. Market support for experimental art may not be possible anymore in the US.

JC: I want to, as strongly as possible, echo everything that you just said. These are conversations we’ve been having for a while and I think these are very serious issues for American art. This is why we’ve chosen to pursue the 501c3 not-for-profit status for Do Not Research. We’re currently in the waiting period, between 22 and 120 days, and we’ll get a confirmation letter from the IRS. Institution building is very serious and necessary now because of this upward drift of age for artists that participate in museums and art fairs, etc.

We both agree that the ideal conditions for making art is a society in which the cost of living is low, the wages are high and you can work part time while you go about your decommodified art practice. Ideally, you can work 3 days a week in the service industry and you can make your weird experimental video art on the side. You can pursue these things absent the pressures of the market. Those are the ideal conditions that create an enormous, explosively experimental art scene that is so exciting.

JK: It’s possible it’s happening right now in other places. For instance, in South East Asia.

I think art could learn a lot from cinema. Film is an inherently more democratic art form and yet it can be just as complicated, rigorous and interesting as contemporary art. It reaches a wider audience. Filmmakers have a different kind of agency than artists do. As an artist you’re subject to all sorts of unwritten industry rules and taboos. The worst of which is that artists aren’t supposed to pitch projects to curators or gallerists. We always have to wait to be asked by the gallerist or the curator, which isn’t the case in film.

Film economics (even in the difficult state they’re in today) are also interesting to look at. Films bring in revenue through the box office. If you’re Bong Joon Ho, David Cronenberg, or Celine Song and people are interested in seeing your film, they pay for tickets. While the financing or seed money comes from investors, the return on investment comes from the public. This is very different than art. Artists don’t get a share of museum ticket sales for their shows. They get an honorarium which doesn’t really cover anything. American artists are supposed to make a living by selling art to rich people–which may or may not work anymore. Your art could have a mass audience, but if rich people aren’t buying your art, it becomes really difficult to make and exhibit ambitious work. Whereas, if you’re a filmmaker and you have a dedicated audience, people will support you and enable you to make more films. This is similar to the way that podcasts work now.

Part of this proposition is that artists need to find a way to free themselves. This probably means younger artists—who aren’t locked into New York, who don’t have families here, who aren’t invested in this place. If they can find a way to free themselves from New York, maybe that could also lead to different ways to fund an experimental art practice in the present.

JC: Social media is ultra-populism and the art world is ultra-elitism. Perhaps film represents a synthesis of the two. It has a democratic mechanism in how it generates revenue that can check or balance the risk of elite capture from investors. I think that’s a fantastic idea.

So, the conditions for making art continue to narrow. I had always considered your work as both an aesthetic and political avant-garde. In the scope of your career, have you hit any friction because of the political content in your work?

JK: Yeah, for sure. Almost all my work is directly political. I’m explicitly trying to make work about current events, as well as about where it’s all leading in the near future. I’m attempting to make complicated work that’s legible for and accessible to people without an expensive arts education. That directness and openness, which for me is a political part of the project, drives certain people in our field crazy.

JC: Was there a certain period in which the political pressures on art seemed to tighten? For example, was 2016 an inflection point at which the conversations took a certain turn?

JK: I think they opened up in 2016. I never thought that I would see an art world so politically engaged. I mean the art world still wasn’t really dealing with economics or class, but it was certainly dealing with some of America’s core problems, like race and the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow and American apartheid. The American art world was even starting to make space for artists talking about the theft of indigenous land and the genocide of native peoples. This was all entering mainstream art discourse and filled the galleries before 2023. It was being supported by collectors. In that way, I think things did really open up. Abroad, a massive post-colonial discourse in art was also flourishing. There was also an opening up to other voices in contemporary art, from other parts of the world, like Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Documenta 15 was curated by Ruangrupa.

If anything, I think the tightening up is happening now. Over the last two years. In the United States, there’s a kind of purge going on. The market is in the process of purging itself of political work. It’s slowly purging itself of the artists of color who rose to prominence between 2016 and 2023. There’s a new wave of self-censorship in the galleries, institutions, and as a result in artist studios.

JC: The potential for radical politics, or niche philosophical ideas, to appear in art was always the thing that attracted me to this field. Professional art is the field that does not abide by discipline of any other field. If you’re a journalist, university professor or documentary filmmaker, any other walk of life, there are certain standards like peer review and scholarly citations that are required. But in art, you are allowed, or even encouraged, to make data agnostic predictions. Artists became trendcasters and could predict what themes would float to the top of culture. In some cases, this openness of art can be incredibly generative. Ryan Trecartin or K-hole’s “normcore” is a fantastic example. Also, Sean Monahan’s “vibe shift”.

On this topic of social media, there’s a striking image of all the tech barons lined up to pay deference to Trump at the inauguration. There’s been a major shift in American culture towards the right. Where does art go next? Does art make a similar cultural turn? How does the art world react to the Trump 2 era?

JK: I don’t think anyone has a clue. I feel like it’s going to be difficult for explicitly right-wing art to enter the institutions. I think that there are enough people with left-wing or at least liberal politics in positions of power in the museums and not-for-profit spaces, that this probably can’t happen. Also, many of the major art museums in America are not dependent on government funding. They can probably avoid what’s happening to the Kennedy Center and Columbia. That said, I think most museums are likely to become more cautious in their programming and about how much they wade into explicit politics.

JC: Given all of the topics that we’ve discussed and seeing how these pressures are shaping American creative life, if we hope to carry on some type of radical thought within contemporary art, what are the primary functions that an institution like Do Not Research should seek to fulfill?

JK: Honestly, I think you need to make exhibitions in the real world with the artists in your community. Multiple exhibitions! And then you write about it. You write about the work and you make arguments for it. Give it an art historical context and argue for its relevance in the present and the future. I think this model still has a lot of power. The exhibitions are the ultimate proof. The work has to actually be good and the only way to know that is to see it in space.

JC: Well, I’m convinced. I agree. Josh Kline, your work is just such a tremendous inspiration and I have admired your practice for so long, it’s great to get the opportunity to do this.

JK: Thanks, Josh, likewise. Thanks for inviting me to be a part of this.

Coyote Time is available to play on desktop at coyotetime.world.
Follow @alicebucknell to stay in the loop.

“Coyote time,” a term derived from Looney Tunes logic, describes a forgiveness mechanic in video games that gives players a few extra frames to jump after their character has stepped off a ledge. Coyote Time is also the title of Los Angeles-based artist Alice Bucknell’s latest game, a pixelated, text-based adventure that unfolds over one bizarre night in St. Louis.

Games have long been central to Bucknell’s practice, from the speculative, game-engaging ecologies of The Alluvials (2023)—the first video game acquired by SFMoMA—to Nightcrawlers (2025), a cooperative multiplayer game about interspecies pollination. Coyote Time continues Bucknell’s experimental practice through a mechanic built around delayed consequence, taking the suspended moment between action and outcome as a way to consider the economic, social, technological, and ecological effects of extractive capitalism already underway but not yet fully registered.

Commissioned for the 2026 St. Louis Counterpublic Triennial by Nora N. Khan, one of five curators organizing the citywide program, the game proved resonant enough to give the entire exhibition its title. Khan and her co-curators expanded Bucknell’s suspended time into a framework for confronting overlapping uncertainties. Clearly, our species has stepped off a precipice. What maneuvers remain before gravity comes to collect?

As Counterpublic opened in September, Bucknell and I connected to talk through post-industrial St. Louis, programmed obsolescence both technological and municipal, and ghosting a gaming industry that’s hyperfixated on fidelity and spectacle.

Coyote Time is available to play on desktop at coyotetime.world.
Follow @alicebucknell to stay in the loop.

SJPC: Games have innumerous mechanics and quirks. What was it about coyote time that captured your attention?

AB: I’m often drawn to video game mechanics and terminology that are obsolete, because they capture a certain ambition or ideology of where gaming was at a specific point in time. In addition to coyote time, I’ve been thinking about “overworld,” which was a playable version of a game map, before open-world was possible. And I am always thinking about the “walking simulator,” first coined as an insult to describe games with simple mechanics. Reinterpreting these frameworks has influenced my practice in recent and ongoing projects. With the coyote time mechanic, specifically, I like how it increases the pleasure of gameplay at the expense of true physics.

SJPC: How did you extrapolate that moment of forgiveness into a game-scale principle?

AB: In a way, it felt pretty natural, asking the question: what if the feeling of the collision bug, glitch, or suspension could be stretched across the whole game? Take noclip mode—the ability to walk through walls or other obstacles—but mold it into a narrative tactic. For Coyote Time, we dilated the dilation, scaling this mechanic upwards into a quantum-adjacent, time-traveling adventure game, where multiple past and future versions of St. Louis collide across the gameplay experience of one long night of adventure.

SJPC: Contemporary art can sometimes feel caught between two extremes: work so withholding that it risks alienating its audience, and work so didactic that it leaves little room for interpretation. Your games seem to operate somewhere between those poles. I wonder whether designing for what you’ve called the “pleasure of gameplay” is liberating in that respect.

AB: Totally! And, importantly, games are amazing because they can stretch the meaning of pleasure into so many other affective territories beyond simply feeling good. Some of my favorite game theorists—Bo Ruberg, Aubrey Anable, and Alenda Y. Chang, who merge the field with queer and ecological theory—talk about no fun gaming, or difficult gaming. This includes experiences of play that make us feel confusion, anger, frustration, sadness, hurt, rumination, or pining. I love games that subvert the idea of pleasure as a necessarily positive feeling. So, in my own games, I try to create space for a broader range of affective impact.

SJPC: You’ve definitely created that with Coyote Time. As I’ve been playing the game, I’ve experienced a complexity of emotions, from nostalgia to genuine anxiety to bliss. This results, in part, to its formal and mechanical aspects, which subvert the hyperreal trajectory of contemporary game design. It’s pixelated, 2D, browser-based, and, at times, relatively frictional.

AB: Well, for the last few years, I have actually been making games with the larger engines, pursuing photorealism and increasingly conglomerated workflows. This includes Small Void (2025), a two-player black hole dating simulator developed during my residency at CERN, and Earth Engine (2026), a single-player exploration game that integrates real-time climate data and real-scale geospatial models of the Earth. Still, Earth Engine has moments where the muscle of realer-than-real terrain scans and gargantuan atmospheric datasets break down and melt into a 2D pixelated aesthetic that centers loss and confusion. Coyote Time is a leap into that space of lossiness and what else emerges in the gaps between the simulated and the real.

SJPC: So, what prompted the full-game pivot? It’s pretty substantial.

AB: With Coyote Time, the decision was as much personal intrigue as it was an attempt to ghost on the progress-obsessed arc of the gaming industry. I wanted to step outside of the 8K-resolution spiral and explore a gamefeel and typology that nods to gaming history while catching a new updraft of interest from the artist-made and indie game scenes. Many artist-made games are intentionally ditching photorealism, moving into more stylized aesthetic terrains to explore complex topics like ecological grief, systemic injustice, climate disaster.

SJPC: Which ones were you playing the most?

AB: I’m really moved by the nuance, poetry and feeling of recent eco-fiction adventure games like Firewatch, Norco, Kentucky Route Zero, and 1000x Resist.

SJPC: What makes them pleasurable, for you as a player?

Interestingly, many of these games are labeled “walking simulators.” But what I think they all have in common is this need to ambulate—to move constantly, but not necessarily with full understanding, across both personal and planetary scales. Norco, a southern gothic petrocapitalist pixel art game set in Louisiana, is particularly influential for this project. And in Firewatch and 1000x Resist, the grief of losing loved ones maps onto anticipatory ecological grief over the loss of a world, revealing this wormhole-type relationship where everything maps onto everything else. As an art form, games can provide this complexity of experience because their immersion is continuous, multisensory, and interconnected.

SJPC: After dropping the pursuit of powerful graphics, where did you direct your design attention?

AB: Because I had been playing so many walking simulators, I realized that once a game’s visuals and mechanics are pared back, its other features come into focus. Suddenly, sound design, UI (user interface) and HUD (heads-up display), narrative, and scriptwriting carry new weight. As a result, Coyote Time features some really unique visuals programming, storyline, and sonic elements that wouldn’t otherwise feel so central. It’s easier to hold and feel their affective impact in a slower, quieter, more ambient game world. Pixel art is also agoraphilic; the medium handles the melancholia of vast post-industrial vistas, empty midnight highways, or a museum after hours exceptionally well. The fixed camera and hand-painted details generate a rich psychic image of the world that’s perennially just beyond-screen. All of this allows the mind to move inwards and within the world simultaneously.

Nina Keith. “River Time (Demo)” from Coyote Time (2026).

SJPC: The game’s sound caught my attention immediately. You worked with Los Angeles composer Nina Keith, whose score is this spiraling tapestry of reverse tape loops, synth swells, and warm percussive bits.

AB: I have been a fan of her music for years, both as an independent artist, and her work with Rachika Nayar as Disiniblud. When she accepted the invite to collaborate, I was over the moon. Nina’s score and sound design gives the game so much emotional texture and depth.

SJPC: Right, it is super-textural and cinematic in a way that would support an open-world fantasy RPG, but instead accompanies this technically much simpler game. What was the collaboration with Nina Keith like?

AB: Working with Nina was incredible, and it is impossible to imagine the world of Coyote Time without her contribution. She also happens to live about five minutes away so we got to do a lot of IRL jam sessions pretty early on. Watching her take rough sketch stills from the game’s different locations and expand them into full, heady, layered compositions was like magic. And that ended up influencing the script, visuals, and programming, too. It’s always a great feeling when all the different parts of a game start talking to each other.

Nina Keith. “Always Coming Home” from Coyote Time (2026).

SJPC: That’s a kind of feedback loop that probably isn’t common in larger productions.

AB: Exactly! We were a small team. I am Coyote Time’s writer and game designer. Nina was our musician and sound artist, with Joseph Pleass and Ben West as developers, and Khaled Makshoush and Omar Khouri creating and coloring the pixel game art. We’re spread across ten time zones, so an infinitely active Discord server was our asynchronous bread and butter.

SJPC: Besides the Counterpublic installations, how else is Coyote Time finding its way into the world?

AB: The game orbits many circles. It’s been playtested at experimental game events in Amsterdam and on the shores of Geneva at La Becque, where I was artist-in-residence this year. And during the Counterpublic opening, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra is performing a live version of the game’s score with Nina! Then, moving beyond art world circuits, we’re planning a Steam launch for the game this year and Nina will be releasing the score as a standalone album.

SJPC: That activation with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra feels really special. What else distinguishes Counterpublic from other large exhibitions that you’ve been a part of?

AB: Counterpublic’s approach to a city-wide art exhibition is really granular. Structurally, it unfurls through five appointed curators. Each curator works closely with their own roster of artists, and is overseen by Counterpublic’s director, James McAnally, a longtime resident who’s been active in the St. Louis art scene for two decades. Every commissioned project is anchored and informed by a physical site—or, in my case, two sites—and the three-year lead-up involves multiple visits, field research, and building connections with the city’s residents. This system means the projects emerge through an intimate and localized relationship to St. Louis, during which you also get a strong sense of the larger systems shaping the city.

SJPC: I imagine that had a significant influence on your game.

AB: It was essential. Coyote Time takes place all over St. Louis and involves a lot of city history, infrastructure, characters, and lore. It’s packed with local Easter eggs. And it operates in a multiscalar way; it’s a first-person POV game that’s connected to, shaping, and being shaped by, broader social, economic, political and ecological systems.

SJPC: What happens to those macro systems when you encounter them at the scale of a single player moving through the city?

AB: Video games are exceptionally good at handling multiscalar POVs. In Coyote Time, local landmarks like City Museum, the National Building Art Center, Mosenthein Island, Kenny’s Upstairs—formerly the Upstairs Lounge—and the SS Admiral riverboat casino are hotspots for uncovering the many histories and possible futures of St. Louis. But these places also map onto larger national and global concerns about the privatization of natural resources, economic and ecological chaos induced by AI and other tech booms, political corruption, and the eating away of social infrastructures. Games allow us to experience a story across the micro and macro scales at once, where close-range sensory data and ludic agency feeds into an understanding of multiple converging systems.

SJPC: You mentioned earlier that your project will be staged at not just one but two physical sites. This includes Laclede’s Landing on the Mississippi River, as well as the City Museum, which features prominently in the game and is far stranger than its name might suggest.

AB: Yes, the multiple lives of Coyote Time! The installation at Laclede’s Landing is more art world-coded. There is a big projector screen, minimalist warehouse-y vibe washed in orange neon, and two stunning hand-made textile banners by Missouri-based artist Janie Stamm that feature scenes and characters from the game. The City Museum installation feels cozier. We’re using furniture pieces from the Museum’s collection and a TV set-up. It’s a bit like a living room set inside the chaosmaxxing Museum, which counts among its accolades a life-size whale sculpture, 10-story-tall spiral slides, a rooftop ferris wheel, and a cave system—all of which appear in the game. Showcasing Coyote Time in City Museum makes the game available to a broader cross-section of the city’s residents and visitors, which feels true to what artist-made video games do best: open up conversations around complex topics, systems and relationships using the medium of play. And a fun fact is that the installation shares a wall with the slides. So, every so often, while playing the game in situ, you’ll hear the rumble and screams of passengers shuttling by in the real slide. Talk about immersion.

SJPC: Early in the game, there is the line: This is what the city does. It lets the structures fail, then it calls the failure blight, then it calls the blight opportunity. It’s talking about St. Louis, but it could be referencing any post-industrial city in Middle America, where total transition toward a service and technology economy is pitched as the rational—and inevitable—future. How do you see text-based adventure games engaging with the fait accompli we’re fed by municipal leaders and techno-solutionists?

AB: Adventure games often scramble time. Take Kentucky Route Zero, where time stretches out over the course of a single hallucinogenic night, inside of which a decades-long tale of systemic debt, displacement, and Rust Belt decay is constellated. Or, a game allows you to inhabit, play, and replay multiple timelines and perspectives, like in 1000x Resist, which addresses intergenerational trauma, the Hong Kong protests, and planetary extinction through a time-travel narrative structure. You could also read into site-specific adventure games a scrambling of space. In Coyote Time, the challenges facing St. Louis—corporate tech takeovers, environmental disaster, political bloating, resource mismanagement, and the economic cycles tying these together—will carry echoes of familiarity with players living in other post-industrial cities nationally and beyond. Globalization’s effects are both amnesiac and omnipresent. Importantly, games introduce agency and the permission to imagine other futures.

SJPC: With Coyote Time, you’ve repurposed supposedly obsolete mechanics and aesthetics to suggest that contemporary games don’t need to be chasing ever-greater fidelity and spectacle. Could that same logic apply to a post-industrial city like St. Louis?

AB: Definitely. I think an issue facing all cities today—but one that’s particularly endemic to post-industrial U.S. urbanism—is that we’re so deep in the neoliberal downward spiral that the hardship created by a failing system is often displaced onto the individuals who call these cities home. On the flip side, communities are incredibly resilient. Organized resistance works, and people rally hard to protect and look out for each other. In my experience, this kind of collective determination for a different future is perhaps nowhere more strongly felt than in St. Louis. Their refusal to fall to the next pecking order of post-industrial zombie development is powerful precisely because it is a refusal born from love and community. That line from the game you referenced earlier—This is what the city does. It lets the structures fail, then it calls the failure blight, then it calls the blight opportunity—includes an important coda: But your mother called it home. In a way, the game contests the very idea of obsolescence itself through its time-traveling subgenre. History pops up onto the game map constantly and uncontrollably, groundhog-like, erupting into the present in order to shape the future.

SJPC: The games that you enjoy as a player and the games that you design might be characterized as either science fiction or speculative fiction. When they are at their best, what do you think is the sociocultural power of these genres?

AB: I like to think of science fiction and speculative fiction as two-way streets: the past shapes the future, but the future can also touch the past. Reading Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia E. Butler, and Cixin Liu, we get this sense of time as a spiral. With Saidiya Hartman, world-making is achieved through both the archive and the future, which are equally significant. Science fiction and speculative fiction let us zoom out on the map to see how larger systems dominate by flattening and condensing reality into a singular plane. These genres allow us to experience an expanded field where we might conceive of other systems and other futures. When I close a book, or leave a game, and return to the world, these spaces of possibility feel more real, closer, and urgent.

Far-right movements are exploding. The vast digital underbelly that helped reshape public opinion and enabled the election of right-wing politicians remains woefully understudied. Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 was the outcome of a decade of coordinated online attacks, disinformation campaigns, and psyops. These digital armies deliberately targeted the political center, exploiting economic anxieties to radicalize and recruit.

I have spent many years immersed in these spaces. I have read their manifestos, studied their tactics — rage-baiting, shitposting, brigading — and intervened where possible, attempting to de-radicalize some of the youngest participants.

This engagement as researcher and anti-fascist shapes my artistic practice. To build tools for de-radicalization, one must not only understand the architecture of extremism but also feel the disillusionment and anger that feeds it.

My current project, Nothing is Sacred (2025–on- going), consists of 26 photographs. The series depicts elaborate sets that explore themes of loneliness, agoraphobia, celibacy, and escapism. At its core lies a growing conviction I observe in the online communities I study: the real world is beyond repair, escape is the only refuge.

Mundane acts such as washing dishes and sitting alone in a cluttered bedroom, are transformed into surreal scenarios, reflecting how people dis- appear into fantasy as a way of coping with the overwhelming reality. The perspective I adopt is that of the hikikomori — the long-term shut-in who has not left their flat for years and lives online. Importantly, these works are not depictions of right- wing ideologues. Many of the people I study, such as volcels (voluntary celibates) are apolitical and identify as queer. Rather, the images reflect the broader social conditions — unemployment, isolation, future anxiety — that make radicalization possible. Despite the heavy themes, the photographs are humorous — allowing the work to reach across divides.

From 2D love and fictosexuality to dating simulators and parasocial bonds, I encountered practices that may seem fringe but reveal much larger shifts in how people connect through screens. The appeal lies in safety and control — attachment without vulnerability, intimacy without proximity. These phenomena reveal the double edge of digital existence — at once a site of long- ing and of withdrawal, a place where the craving for human contact collides with the retreat into customized and controllable worlds.

The photographed sets are artificial even when they appear real, built from scratch in my studio, a crucial metaphor for the fabricated nature of virtual realities. Within them, I slip in references — easter eggs that resonate with the communities I study, while remaining emotionally legible to wider audiences.

Andy King (b. 1988) is a digital media artist whose satirical and political works focus on internet subcultures, loneliness and human relationships in the digital age. She explores the blurring of borders between truth and fiction, copy and original, private and public spaces.

This past year, American artist Robert Longo mounted an expansive solo show at Pace Gallery in New York titled “The Weight of Hope.” The gallery displayed massive, gorgeous black-and-white drawings that mostly reproduce politically-charged photographs and film stills from the past fifteen years. While technically impressive, the images seemed politically sterile, and I was struck by the frank admission of their ineffectiveness by Pace founder Arne Glimcher:

“This Robert Longo show probably wouldn’t be taken by a museum today. It’s all about what Trump has done to our country. I think we have to fight it, and we have to make shows that are conspicuous, that get us in trouble. I was hoping for more trouble for this show than we got.” (i)

In my first reading, I understand some kind of disappointment in—which betrays a belief in the social function of—institutions to practice social critique. This reflects Glimcher’s generation’s belief in the power of commercial goods to affect political discussions, a belief that may seem strange. Glimcher would probably, fairly, anticipate and dismiss this criticism. As much has been said about Longo and his peers for decades, and their political advocates would likely argue that the potential social change in the given art-object vehicle outweighs the cost of critique’s neutralization. But there is still a clear acknowledgement that this desired “trouble” was not generated, and I contend it is not through a failure in subject matter nor execution, but in a methodological difference drawn by advancing technology over recent decades.

This older generation of artist and dealer, coming from the postmodern 1980s, does not understand the epistemic changes in visual culture since the advent of the internet and livestreamed violence. The sterility of Longo’s show reveals an inadequacy, inherent to his method, to speak to the ultracontemporary. To explain this, I will show why Longo’s recent works fail a more conventional reading, and then look at some of the underlying assumptions in these conventions of media theory to examine how times have changed. By briefly examining the history of some of Longo’s more infamous works with real-world violence, I will suggest new parasocial logics governing the relationships between viewer and viewed, between artwork and audience. This ties to the new framework of neo-orality, recently explored on the New Models podcast through the writings of Jacqueline Fendt, whereby the loss of consensus reality and abandonment of objectivity in the social media age inverts the historical Western move from an oral to a textual society, with corresponding epistemological changes. Here, I suggest that like text, images can work as fixed reference points to an external reality, whether or not that reality is real, and the stability of these sources has come into question in the age of the doomscroll. Can an art that relies on such twentieth-century fixed images still critique politics that are played out in a different arena?

Many are now familiar with the political failings of the critical postmodern artists of the 1980s; Longo himself acknowledged in 2003 that, “I had an ego that was totally out of control… I wanted to take an aggressive position in a culture that I thought was sick… In hindsight, one risks becoming what one critiques.” (ii) Yet, more than twenty years on, Longo has returned to that bombast to criticize the Trump administration, with Glimcher acknowledging, “I would like the agencies in the government to take note of what we are doing here. We have the First Amendment on the windows of this show.” (iii)

It may strike younger or more cynical readers as quite obvious that these postmodern retreads would be politically ineffective. Alex Greenberger, in his review for ArtNews, quite effectively pinpointed that the show was so painfully on-the-nose, and at times even deceptive, that it did little to dispel the notion that;

“Longo used to be a more thoughtful artist… the works tell Longo’s intended audience what it already knows: Something is rotten in the state of America. If you are interested in what is rotten and why it’s rotten—and all the nuance that goes along with that—you’d best look elsewhere.” (iv)

Critique is itself essential to the preservation of the American political system. Longo’s show would always have been allowed for its social utility of inoculation-via-critique. Governments tolerate and even foment critique to defang a controlled opposition and manufacture moral permission for their own censorious capacity, a default policy for liberal democracies through the twentieth century, though one more tenuously held by the current administration. The lack of “trouble” points not to tolerance by the government, but apathy. The Trump administration frequently makes a show of addressing and combating critique; this show, in New York, with a famous artist, at a mega-gallery, was not even on their radar. Was this due to the general political irrelevance of contemporary art, or because the type of critique in this show was not itself dangerous?

Longo has traditionally built his work from photography and film stills, two mediums which imply discrete temporal bounds. Particularly given his work’s relationship to the aestheticization of violence, this implies that the overwhelming saturation of the documentary image numbs us to the visceral reality depicted within. But times have changed, and violence is now livestreamed daily from warzones and hostage scenarios and university shootings to an audience searching desperately for immediacy. These records are often unverifiable, misdated, heavily edited, AI-altered, and so on. What matters now is not that the violence overwhelms us, or even that it is real or well-explained. Rather, the neo-oral subject seeks to invest themselves in the event, to react to it, to accumulate, evaluate, and redistribute vibes in a post-truth attention economy. Doomscrolling and livestreaming are the new meta, and the temporal indeterminacy implied by the epistemological death of the photographic documentary mean that just like violence, political critique must take a new vibes-based position if it is to cause trouble. By analyzing the relationship between Longo’s Guernica Redacted (2014) and real-world shootings, we can see how this technological shift has left Longo behind, thus why his Pace show was so politically toothless, and what it suggests for political critique in contemporary art.

Longo’s work works best when he is able to create a distance between subject and artwork, when the reproduced medium of film or photography, through overwhelming scale or repetition or unreadability, is able to engender disaffection. This disaffection is what draws us inwards, to interrogate our own assumptions and relationships to visual culture. These successes were described by Craig Owens;

“Longo’s images resist ambiguity; they might, in fact, serve as emblems of that blind confrontation of antithetical meanings which characterizes the allegory of unreadability. Suspended in a static image, a struggle to the death is transformed into something that ‘has all the elegance of a dance.’ Yet it is precisely this ambivalence that allows violence to be transformed into an aesthetic spectacle in photographs and films, and on television.” (v)

But what are the epistemological conditions for that internal transference to occur? We must take the film stills and photographs that Longo works from to be documentary of a reality that firstly is external to us, and secondly that we can become numb to through exposure. He engages these conditions directly in his censored reproduction of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937).

Large black bars intervene in the wide expanse of Longo’s charcoal copy, which rather than engaging with the political newsprints Picasso was reading at the time, reference wartime film reels and omissions in the coverage of violence. This treats the documentary technologies, of film, of newsprint, or even of master copies, as factical, and led John-Paul Stonard to conclude that, “A sense of brutality lies at the heart of Longo’s approach to historical witness.”vi Two perforations mar the otherwise-smooth surface. As Longo explained;

“Guernica Redacted went to a museum in Germany and then to a museum in Ohio, the Wexner Center. When the museum was closed, a disgruntled security guard came in and started shooting a bunch of art. He put two bullet holes in the drawing, and then shot himself in front of it. So, Guernica still provokes.” (vii)

This intervention is itself not just a puncture, but a punctum, after Roland Barthes, where the artwork reaches into the viewer and provokes, unsettles, wounds. The viewer, in this case, returned that unto the art object, thereby completing the work and leaving it behind, scarred, as a piece of evidence. Our understanding of it is now constrained by this closed loop of meaning, which is quite friendly to Longo’s mythos, but does not allow the artwork to speak forwards into ultracontemporary times of conflict. It is, essentially, frozen in time as a frame in this finite, film still, roll-credits image culture.

Consider the act of this security guard, which was apparently unwitnessed. Could this have happened today? A contemporary subject, desperate to transact in vibes and reactions, might be unable to keep this to themselves; reality is now a construct of our own fluid digital projections. Hal Foster noted, in reference to Andy Warhol’s car-crash pictures, “even as he or she may mourn the victims, even identify with them masochistically, he or she may also be thrilled, sadistically, that there are victims of whom her or she is not one.” (viii) In the age of IRL streaming, this self-insertion has developed into full parasocial relationships. If this security guard carried out this act today, he might not have been so compliant to Longo’s chosen media and “completed,” so to say, the art object with perforation. He might have livestreamed it, like Brenton Tarrant Facebook-livestreaming a 2019 anti-Muslim massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, or disgruntled right-winger Steven Righini, with his young daughter hostage, posting videos explaining himself during a 2025 police shootout in Maine. Death is no longer an end-point; someone else has to pick up your phone and end your livestream. To exist is not to leave a stable record of oneself, but to be logged-on and witness.

Many readers will have unwittingly encountered a horrific act of violence livestreamed online, taken from its context but as an island of visceral realness in a sea of slop. I saw clips of Tarrant’s massacre briefly on Twitter, before they were taken down. The first-person perspective made me think I was watching clips of a video game or training exercise. In the case of Righini, one of his videos automatically played while I was scrolling on X, his swollen, reddened face pleading with his family members to understand his actions, apologizing for what he had to do. Then, a hard cut to the next clip, a still image of the Thing from Marvel’s Fantastic Four, serenaded by Supa King’s refrain, “If I beat that pussy up, is you gon’ tell on me?” As Greenberger determined of the film component to Longo’s show, “If editing images together in such quick succession that they appeared to strobe incomprehensibly is a metaphor for the rapid-fire nature of our present media environment, it’s a tired one.” (ix) Longo’s interface with saturated image culture, and his finite sense of temporality, has grown old because our attention spans have caught up. So, we are looking for a more immediate form of visual storytelling into which we can insert ourselves. Whether or not these clips are perceived as real or fantasy, and perhaps even moreso if the latter, they provide an avenue for vicarious self-insertion, as Foster noted of the punctum’s voyeur. Precisely because these livestreamed records of violence are historically unstable, prone to deletion, partial censorship, and AI alteration, our oral recollections of seeing them are more powerful than the media itself. This is a turn to neo-orality, a kind of vibes-based post-truth epistemology that seems to correspond more closely to Longo’s more interesting early work than the recent Pace drawings.

For example: The first person I ever saw die online was a Russian ambassador, shot during a press conference. I encountered this video the day after the shooting occurred in December 2016. I was a high school student scrolling on Twitter and this video was next up. I did not read the caption. Of course, I was horrified when I realized I had just witnessed a man’s death. What stood out to me most was the disjointedness within the video, which was both visual and mental, as I suddenly understood what I was watching. The unremarkable calm, followed by the ambassador’s shoulders crumpling and the confused expression on his face, followed by the gleam of steel and fervor in the shooter behind him. Longo actually has commented on this very shooting: “Recently – it was very sad – the Russian ambassador in Turkey was shot, and people texted me and said it looked like one of the Men in the Cities. He was the right age, he was wearing the right clothes, the right haircut.” (x) And in the moments before I realized he had been shot and after, trying to understand if this was a clip from some show or skit, I experienced that same ambivalence and unreadability that Owens highlighted as the success in such early Longo pictures. I trafficked in vibes and reactions rather than textual, stable meaning, because until I saw the Associated Press pick it up later that day, I could not know the reality of the media I was observing. “Truth” was being manufactured by vibes-based intuiting from competing, unreliable sources on my For You Page.

Compare this to Longo’s show at Pace, with its well-attributed, occasionally-altered but factual source images from events we all remember from the news. There is nothing truly dangerous about this, not because its political claims are unspecific, but because it fails to engage with images of violence on the level at which they are nowadays distributed; it does not actively engage with our vibes-based attention economy. We do not look to images for their veracity, a veracity which can be blurred and question through postmodern techniques of repetition or decontextualization. This very veracity is no longer interesting, because along with the breakdown of consensus reality, we use our familiarity with postmodern media techniques to “vibe-out” the nature of something through performance and reaction rather than deduce a series of facts. The Trump administration is well-versed in post-truth communication, providing the template for an entire media ecosystem and new age of politics. Consensus is no longer achieved through logical deduction and good-faith debate, but through mirroring the correct patterns, reacting the correct Pepe, accumulating aligned vibes. Failing to make a political critique in the appropriate ultracontemporary method dooms one’s efforts, and partially explains why Longo’s show, and more generally, political contemporary art seems so toothless and irrelevant. If artists want to truly rock the boat, art needs to catch up.

i Halperin, J. (2025, Nov. 25). ‘Optimistic, Aren’t I?’: Pace’s Arne Glimcher on Running a Start-Up Gallery at 87. Cultured Mag. https://www.culturedmag.com/article/2025/11/25/art-arne-glimcher-pace-125-newbury-interview/.

ii Robert Longo in interview with Mary Haus.

Haus, M. (2003, March). Robert Longo. Artforum 41(7), 239. https://www.artforum.com/columns/robert-longo-2-165815/.

iii Halperin, “‘Optimistic, Aren’t I?’”.

iv Greenberger, A. (2025, Sep. 18). Robert Longo Fails to Meet the Moment in a Pace Gallery Mega-Show. ARTnews. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/reviews/robert-longo-pace-gallery-review-1234752550/.

v Owens, C. (1994). “‘The Allegorical Impulse, Pt. II”. In Beyond Recognition, University of California Press, 79.

vi Stonard, John-Paul. (2017, January). Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, and Robert Longo. Artforum 55(5). https://www.artforum.com/events/francisco-goya-sergei-eisenstein-and-robert-longo-226984/.

vii Robert Longo in interview with Joe Lloyd. Lloyd, J. (2017, Sep. 22). Robert Longo: ‘I’m making artworks out of dust.’ Studio International. https://www.studiointernational.com/robert-longo-interview-im-making-artworks-out-of-dust.

viii Foster, H. (1997). Death in America. In OCTOBER: The Second Decade, 1986-1996, ed. Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, Yves-Alan Bois, et. al., October Magazine and MIT Press, 335.

ix Greenberger, “Robert Longo”.

x Robert Longo in interview with Joe Lloyd.

Founded in 2021, DNR began as a private chat server where artists gathered to discuss memetics and emergent political trends. Today, the blog has published work by nearly 400 contributors from around the world. This is our fourth anthology volume.

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Mark Leckey’s 2009 thesis, “Mark Leckey in a Long Tail World”, is a futurist theory on the revolutionary potential of the internet as a vehicle for artists to meaningfully shape culture. In the years since his lecture, many of the ideas he presented have, in various ways, been realized. The internet has removed many of the barriers of cultural production, allowing for the formation of micro-centers of culture, politics and art (including, arguably, this very blog).

Various types of heretofore undocumented or suppressed information has been distributed and popularized, bringing new ways of understanding the world, providing people with access to functionally life-saving knowledge and shaping the political desires of a whole generation. But in the 17 years since Leckey’s lecture, platform capture and monopolization, big data surveillance, reactionary lawmaking and weak regulation have decisively foiled a total realization of the revolutionary potential of p2p and the open web 2.0. In 2026, we stand at a critical juncture for Leckey’s vision of the web, as the long tail faces a new, corrupting, and potentially overwhelming enemy in the form of generative AI.

I first watched Mark Leckey’s lecture “Mark Leckey in a Long Tail World” in October this year, perched in front of my laptop at my kitchen table. Online there exists a recording of his performance at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 2009, split into seven parts and uploaded to YouTube. In it, Leckey sets out his conceptualization and personal experience with “The Long Tail of the Internet”. He goes beyond the conventions of a regular lecture, making use of props, stage lighting, music, and vocal effects. I watched and listened as his saturated, 240p form roamed around the stage, his excited British voice beaming from his headset mic to the auditorium sound system to the video camera microphone to my laptop speakers 17 years into the future. As the lecture unfolded, I begun to feel agitated. By the time it ended, I was paranoid. Watching alone in my kitchen in the middle of the day it felt like, through Leckey, the internet itself was talking to me. Like this extremely niche video with 750 views, linked to me via a Discord server in the backwaters of the internet where it had dramatically shaped the life of approximately 20 post-internet art pol losers, was foretelling it’s own arrival to my screen.'

The idea of the long tail itself is not new; the use of the term in statistics dates as far back as the 1950s, and journalist Chris Anderson wrote a whole book on the concept as applied to the online media market in 2004. But Leckey’s specific take as it pertains to desire, art, and the internet, as well as his very deliberate presentation of that take, is pretty original. He starts by laying out how new technology has changed the nature of cultural production and transmission. In the 20th century we had broadcasting, a distribution system of one to many, like radio or television. Audience demand took the form of a Pareto curve, with producers making media for the 80% majority. However, in the 21st century, as media became digital, the cost of production (and reproduction) became so marginal it was materially insignificant. Consequentially, Leckey argues, we saw a huge upsurge in the volume of mass media, specifically content catering to niche audiences. This is what makes up the long tail; an unlimited choice of perpetual and imperishable content catering to an ever-subdividing market of individual interests. As time passes the tail can only grow longer and longer, the web’s functionally infinite storage space laying out the contents of your timeline to fossilise behind you as you scroll. Time is converted into an arrangement of space along the length of the tail and thus the online world becomes an everywhen, a sedimented accumulation of everything that has ever been uploaded since the web was first made public in 1993. This idea is a compelling one, particularly in the way that it makes a sensible topography out of the seemingly endless data stream of the internet.

Having (literally) roughly chalked out what the long tail is, Leckey then examines it’s potential implications. Back in 2009 his outlook for the future of the long tail phenomenon is hopeful and radically humanist. He sees the ossified cultural production along the tail as an endless list of options from which we can choose from for realising our deepest libidinal desires. What’s more, if we understand the internet in its ideal form as a decentralised network of users, each datapoint along the length of the tail represents not only a piece of content but also a person, or group of people, who made that content. Because each user is interacting with each other in real time, we can create a peer-to-peer feedback loop of desire and production; online content is created to realise the needs, beliefs, and desires of the interconnected group of peers who make it.

At this point Leckey steps things up a notch. He tells the crowd that, through the long tail machine, we can arrive at the future of desire. Smoke is flooding the stage, IDM is pumping through the speakers. Leckey speaks in foreboading monotone about how all of humanity is going to be united in ecstatic cybernetic equilibrium, a sort of Human Instrumentality Project-like singularity. The long tail will bend into a ouroboros and we “become one with the swarm”. This long tail machine would have a feedback loop so immediate and effectively self-regulating that it becomes almost prescient; our desires are informed by our content / our content is informed by our desires. The long tail know the contents of our dreams before we dream them.

“It seems that I can actually just wish things into existence, especially pictures. Whatever image I imagine, or hope for, seems to be already there (on the internet), waiting.”
– Mark Leckey, The Long Tail, 2009

It was this line in particular that really threw me, because it reminded me immediately of a contemporary advertisement I had read just the other day:

In 2009, Leckey calls his activated cybernetic long tail machine an “an anagram engine” that collates all of human culture and knowledge into it’s system. Such a description is not far from how we might understand large language models in 2026. Fed with monumental amounts of data non-consensually scraped from almost the entire internet, generative AI is a vertical integration of the long tail, instantaneously parsable via nothing more than a prompt typed into a textbox. LLMs are a crude perversion of the long tail manifest, bottom-trawling the repository of humanity’s collective consciousness, consuming a vast amount of data that no single human mind could hold, and in return offering up synthetic, reconstituted, profoundly disturbing franken-content.

When viewed through this lens, we gain a new insight on the potential impacts of generative AI on online culture and cultural transmission. The first and most immediate consequence of the advent of LLMs has been the pollution of the internet. The Facebook algorithm has been shovelling AI images into people’s feeds for years, encouraging users to waste their days interacting with fake artist babies and shrimp Jesus. OpenAI has made a TikTok clone with a timeline solely made up of AI generated videos, and it has 4.5 million daily users. In January last year, AI-generated articles officially overtook human-made ones. AI slop is everywhere. At the same time, Google Search AI summaries are siphoning viewership and consequentially ad revenue from individual sites, reducing the economic incentive for people to create original content in the first place.

Using the long tail model, we can predict that as the proportion of real, human-made content continues to rapidly decrease, the feedback loop that sustains the long tail ouroboros will become contaminated. Internet culture will become derivative in the most literal sense, as human posters are replaced by AI models that cannot do anything more than recycle their past output. Everything on your timeline becomes another reconstitution of a reconstitution of a reconstitution of a reconstitution of a viral twitter meme from five year ago.

Simultaneous to the pollution of the long tail will be its individualisation. Instead of creating and consuming online culture in tandem with our peers, our timelines will become hyper-individualised. Peer-to-peer is replaced with data-to-corporation-to-consumer; user profiling and predictive algorithms become so strong they can literally “foresee” (create) your “needs” (drive to consume) before you do. Like when you get an ad on YouTube for a product that claims to meet a need you have, but have never spoken about. Every user will have their own personal micro-ouroboros, their desires and needs mediated and met by a machine.

“Soon you will open Netflix, you open up Instagram, and it’s gonna be content that only you see. It’s gonna be that specific.”
– Connor O’Malley, Stand Up Solutions, 2024

This new feedback cycle leaves room for unilateral prompt-injection by the owners of the algorithms. Leckey’s engine was supposed to include humanity: his long tail machine was decentralised, dispersed across the desktops and minds of billions of internet users and thus mediated through the mechanics of real, profoundly empathetic and inherently mass democratic interactions between people. Generative AI cedes the collective power of the long tail in guiding culture to the owners of the algorithms. It’s common knowledge that algorithms, including LLMs, are instilled with various beliefs and bias explicitly or implicitly predetermined by the sociopaths in Silicon Valley. If you peel back much of contemporary discourse/ marketing/ propaganda about AI, you can find at it’s core a normative, technocratic belief in the importance and benefits of ‘efficiency’, which is itself effectively a codeword for ever-greater margins of capitalist value extraction.

“A lot of people saw that Peter Thiel interview and they were like, oh that’s funny that a guy thinks like that. You have no fucking clue how bad it is. You have no idea. You have no idea how the most powerful people, who are in control of the tech, don’t give a fuck about you. They hate you. They hate your flesh, they hate your bone, they hate your brain. Every part of you that is inefficient they want to replace with efficiency. Guess what’s left when you do that? Nothing. You are what is inefficient.”
– Jreg, Expanding The Tech Spectrum, 2025

Through these dual processes of pollution and individualisation, eventually the p2p network of human interaction holding the long tail together will dissolve. Each of us will become lost and isolated netizens, surrounded by ever-multiplying phantoms in our own subconscious-scraped, prompt-engineered slopidises where all “new” culture we consume is nothing more than the personalised bastardisation of content past. The future online is a special shade of grey picked just for you.

It’s ironic really: the very fact that I even watched Leckey’s lecture in the first place is a sign that, at least right now, the long tail persists. The fact that I was inspired to write this article, and you are reading it on the Do Not Research Substack, proves peer-2-peer discussion of stupid niche bullshit isn’t dead yet. Hell, maybe reading this will inspire something in you, and then you will create a wonderful piece of art that inspires others - a perfect instance of Leckey’s long tail machine still in action.

The following text is an excerpt from my book “Conspiratorial Design - Information Design for the Bigger Picture”, slightly adapted to work as a standalone article. In the book, I try to articulate a series of formal and theoretical intersections between the world of design and that of conspiracy theories, using diagrams as an access point to the topic.

Looking for Patterns: Conspiratorial Design

Conspiratorial design: a disposition towards information that uses design methods and tools of representation to achieve a hypertrophic synthesis. The conspiratorial designer assumes that there is a hidden and emergent knowledge they can disclose because they have a privileged total perspective to see the bigger picture. Through conspiratorial design, one can see and make others see the invisible connections between the dots that form the greater whole. Let’s now try to expand this synthetic definition further.

Style and Roles

In the essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics, historian Richard Hofstadter describes conspiracy theories not simply as a belief or a mentality but as a style. He calls it “paranoid style”. The framework of the style allows for a more nuanced understanding of the issue that goes beyond a simple set of beliefs, including the psychological disposition and the particular rhetorical flourish. For this reason, I think it can be useful to think of conspiratorial design as a style: I consider it an expression of the paranoid style in the world of design and art. Hofstadter compared the paranoid style to an artistic current. Following his comparison, let’s consider conspiratorial design as a new current in the design field, and let’s look at the aesthetic and rhetorical features that can help us identify it.

OBSCURED KNOWLEDGE → Conspiratorial design is recognizable by a taste for displayed complexity, where a central goal of an artifact is to exhibit extreme convolution, multiplicity, and interconnectedness, without necessarily trying to disclose it. Something similar is described by Manuel Lima in his book Visual Complexityas “networkism”, the recent infatuation of artists with complex network structures. Some examples of networkism can be seen in works such as Archie Moore’s Kith and Kin or the work of Thomas Saraceno. When in front of such works, the audience often feels like they are in the presence of a sort of sacred geometry, a work that conceals a well-engineered mystery like an esoteric artifact. Anyone interested in contemporary design might have noticed how a vague taste for esoterism permeates the field. Many young designers seem to be echoing the invitations to re-enchantment present in the philosophical discourse (derived from Max Weber’s theories), by repurposing myths, magic traditions, and more or less ancient symbols to represent contemporary issues. I see these kinds of works as part of a broader phenomenon: the diffusion of what I’d call an “aesthetic of obscured knowledge”, where a work gestures toward a hidden system, a contemporary condition, or a power structure, yet never fully reveals it—as if veiled by the very complexity it attempts to represent. The subject is there, but it remains slightly blurry, as if it were the viewer’s task to complete the image and recognize the shape within the shadow. This “shadow” becomes the aesthetic object itself. There are cases of graphic artists and designers who integrate esoteric symbolism in their works, like Paul Laffoely, Jonathan Barnbrook and the previously mentioned Suzanne Treister, and in some cases even historicized design figures like Victor Papanek. Yet beyond direct references, I believe a more generalized esoteric tone permeates many design practices, partly due to how design is perceived. A design exhibition may appear mysterious to outsiders, not just because they’re unfamiliar with the field, but also because of curatorial intention. Designers who think of their work as magical also want it to look magical.

INVESTIGATIONS → A frequent trope that design shares with conspiracy theories is the theme of the investigation. It became a standard to define what a design project does (supposedly) rather than what it is, and typically, among the actions that designers say their projects do, they often “investigate”. In some cases this rhetorical choice comes from an ambition to do what, for example, Forensic Architecture does, namely working for a collective good and fighting injustice (in their case by conducting actual forensic investigations) using the tools of design. But in the case of many design projects, the idea of the investigation and the term “investigate” itself is adopted metaphorically, often in, to express what the research that inspired the project was about. The theme of the investigation is then evoked in exhibitions by displaying unintelligible sketches, fragmented atlases of images, and piles of books with bookmarks, to suggest to the spectator that the project itself is just the tip of an abyssal iceberg. By describing this practice I don’t mean to dismiss the value of some important research and inquiries that can be made by designers. Rather I want to suggest that adopting this kind of rhetorical tool can be a way to delude ourselves into the fact that a project is truly capable of achieving what it claims, misleading us from other possible means to really achieve those goals.

RPG → As I said, I think the conspiratorial style resides in the visuality as much as in the rhetorics. For example, an important feature of conspiratorial design resides in the rhetorics of the roles. The way designers think and present their role in society, as well as the way they treat and present the information they’re asked to process, underlies again an esoteric approach. To explain what I mean by this, let’s first take a look at how esoterism is embedded in conspiracy theories. As the amount of knowledge necessary to understand contemporary society increases and becomes more specific (especially the technical/ scientific), access to it becomes a privilege reserved for a few initiates: those who have the time and the resources to engage with the specificity. As a consequence, some people will perceive that information as occult (more or less literally) and treat it as such. And occult information needs a figure who can access the “higher”, hidden knowledge and disclose it. This happened with QAnon, where an anonymous user (most probably more than one), signed as Q, convinced many people on 4chan that they were in possession of pieces of information about the secret world order and started to disseminate them with vague hints—the so-called “crumbles” or “Q drops”. But conspiracy theories are fundamentally a collective, bottom-up phenomenon: the anonymous user Q may disseminate the crumbles “vertically”, but others are free to embody its role and propose new versions of the theory, as it happens all the time. It is the case of Dylan Louis Monroe, an obscure graphic artist whom I consider a prime example of conspiratorial design and the person who designed the diagrams that started my research (as well as one that was pastiched for Do Not Research). Monroe is a follower of many conspiracy theories stemming from QAnon, with a background in graphic and fashion design, who in 2017 started producing variations on QAnon theories and formalizing them in huge diagrams (the “deep state mapping project”) that went extremely viral—interestingly enough, using an epitome that we could otherwise associate with a designer: “the map-maker”. In one of his diagrams (The Cult of Baal), Monroe repurposed the “Tree of Life” of Kabalah, an ancient diagram belonging to Jewish mysticism, to illustrate his theories. It’s interesting to notice that to illustrate his political ideas he chose a cosmogram. The implicit message was clear: just as the purpose of the Tree of Life was to synthesize esoteric knowledge (the manifestations of God), so his diagram can encompass and evoke a godlike knowledge. Monroe’s work was also later exhibited at the Met. The embodiment of the prophetic role is also evident in the archetypes used in the conspiracy discourse. Nobody would like to think of themselves as a conspiracy theorist; it is way more comforting to identify as a heretic, someone who dares to cross the boundaries of the limited conventional knowledge to imagine new worlds. Now, coming back to design, let’s consider again this archetype I just described: the revolutionary agitator, who mediates between the people and a higher truth, and that, thanks to the capacity to create new connections, can create a new awareness. It doesn’t deviate too much from the archetypal role that many designers and artists identify with and want for themselves. Designers yearn to be wizards: creators of great and abrupt change and innovation, capable of peeking into the future and able to inspire great stupor. As I will try to explain in the section called “Esoteric traditions”, I think this conception has its roots in the origins of design.

RIDDLES AND PROPHECIES → Talking about prophetic figures, I find it meaningful to talk briefly about language and the way I see it used in conspiratorial design. Let’s get into the matter of prophecies and riddles. As many design practices and contemporary art become intertwined to the point that it becomes hard to tell them apart, we can witness how many design projects follow contemporary art in its progressive dependency on language. In his Art School Report Brad Troemel describes the widespread use of what he calls “artspeak” inside art schools. By “artspeak” he means roughly what Alix Rule and David Levine already defined as “International Art English”, namely a mode of expression typical of the art world, whose prime purpose is displaying the belonging to the cultural elite of art (and we can extend that to design as well) and the knowledge of its etiquette, even at the expenses of clear communication. Nonetheless, having a jargon that sounds obscure outside of its field may be partially problematic, but it’s also typical of almost every professional field. As Troemel points out, the issue is not that artspeak is not universally comprehensible, but rather that it’s not comprehensible by the same people who adopt it. And this happens because clear comprehension is not its goal. The artspeak works by creating a dense cloud of highly sophisticated terms (buzzwords, one may say) whose connections are hard to grasp, inviting in this way the readers to combine them, taking part in a process of collaborative creation of the meaning of the text. Language becomes programmatically ambiguous and open-ended, but at the same time exclusive to those who have just enough deciphering tools to participate in the game. This sort of collective game based on allusive riddles is not a social dynamic exclusive to art and design, and I mention it because, once again, I think its peak case study comes from conspiracy theories. QAnon’s community engagement was based on collective investigatory games based on the previously mentioned “crumbles”. Since the main object of study of this text is information design, here’s a quick selection of the most “information-design-core” ones: “Information is knowledge, Knowledge is power, Information is power”- “Research for yourself ”-“Focus on the content”- “Trust the plan”-“Do you see a pattern?”-“Learn to read the map”. QAnon adepts were invited to “learn to read the map”, suggesting not to escape from the mysteries but to delve into them to figure them out—or at least have the sensation of having done so. The idea is that the truth is concealed in riddles to keep the profanes out, but the revelation is right around the corner: you just have to learn the language. At the same time, as Troemel describes, with the rise of conceptual art, art and design schools started implementing assignments for students in the form of riddles—vague and intentionally ambiguous demands that are no longer just a task for the student to perform but a mystery to solve in order to understand what cannot be explained. The assignments are designed with the hope that, in the deciphering process, the students will find the truth within themselves and rise as new members of the riddlers. One crucial problem that Troemel points out is that by adopting the artspeak, the art community ends up giving up any form of self and reciprocal criticism (in this sense, designers adopt the label of “critical” in the same way conspiracy theorists adopt the one of “skeptical”). Esoteric language, both in the case of the artspeak and the “conspiracy-speak” is useful because it’s innocuous and can always defuse conflict by shifting the meaning of what everyone means. In this way, every conspiracy theory and every design project that promises to offer an outlook on possible futures maintains an optimal level of ambiguity and malleability, becoming an always self-fulfilling prophecy, because the prophet never gave a key to it anyway.

A Taxonomy

After proposing some of the aesthetic and rhetorical features of conspiratorial design, I wish to specify that identifying it is a matter of threshold, and deciding where the threshold sits is again a matter of ambiguity and intentions. We could think of a sort of taxonomy based on this. We would have three categories: “conspiracy by design”, “design by conspiracy” and “conspiratorial design”.

“Conspiracy by design” would be a very restricted category of works that intentionally recreate or parody conspiracy theories. Some examples could be the installation Meme Manifesto by the collective Clusterduck, which recreates the typical conspiracy meme of the ‘crazy wall’. Luther Blisset’s hoaxes, that in the 1990s were diffusing fake news to then expose bad journalistic practices. The parody religion of Discordianism, that proposes a cult that professes and worships anti-religious concepts like chaos and absurdity. An interesting aspect of this category is connected to the concepts expressed previously about parody mixing with reality. A fascinating case is Birds aren’t real, a conspiracy theory suggesting that all birds are actually governmental surveillance drones. It was born as a parody of the absurd claims of Trump supporters that ended up being incorporated in conspiratorial narratives: thousands of people started believing it, and others who understood its parody nature accused it of being a PSYOP (Psychological Operation, i.e., secret governmental acts of mass psychological manipulation) designed to dismiss the value of other valuable conspiracy theories. Even more unsettling is the story of the collective Wu Ming/Luther Blisset, who suggests that there are some clues pointing to the fact that whoever started QAnon may have drawn inspiration from their 1999 novel Q and from the acts of culture jamming they were operating in that period. In a quote, once again from Foucault’s Pendulum, that has by now become a kind of modern adage, Umberto Eco captures his concerns about parody with an ironic remark: “Beware of faking: everyone will believe you”. I’m not mentioning these cases as a paternalistic warning to “not play with fire,” but rather because I find it meaningful to acknowledge that such episodes do exist.

“Design by conspiracy” would be the actual conspiracy theories illustrated with design tools. An example is the work of visual artist David Dees, who creates grotesque images depicting conspiracy theories. But here the prime example would be the works of Dylan Louis Monroe and his “Deep State Mapping Project”, even if just as an apex of all the countless vernacular conspiracy diagrams and infographics that you can find online. “design by conspiracy” are works of people who, from outside the world of design, spontaneously understood the rethorics of information design as well its synthesizing and persuasive power, and used it for their purposes.

Lastly, “conspiratorial design” are projects mainly recognized as art or design but that, in their investigative or speculative intentions and in their intricate style, display a conspiratorial aspect. Some examples could be the large-scale infographics of Vladan Joler and Kate Crawford, such as Calculating Empires or Anatomy of an AI System, where they examine the relations between global networks of power and technological systems. Metahaven’s Sunshine Unfinished—an infographic in the shape of a board game tracing the history of the concept of “transparency” in politics, philosophy, architecture, and other fields. The Cloud Cosmogram by Selena Savic, Johannes Bruder, and Maya Indira Ganesh—a speculative diagram about the transformation of human labor within data centers. The Narrative Structures of Mark Lombardi— huge diagrams that try to visualize the structures of financial and political power, corruption, and affairs among capitalists, politicians, corporations, and governments. The even more immense diagrams by Bureau d’études, like the ones contained in Atlas of Agendas, that with their own style pursue grossly the same attempt as Lombardi. Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, an institutional critique artwork that investigates the exploitative real estate practices in New York City with photographs and diagrams. These are all examples of graphic investigations that, while being all inspiring in their own kind, do not exhaust my definition of conspiratorial design and are not sufficient to express how much I think this style extends. We can perceive the conspiratorial in a lot of contemporary graphic design, for example in some of the work of Boot Boyz Biz, like the publication Now-Time Issue 1. Also what I want to argue is that we can find a conspiratorial aspect even in mainstream information design, the one meant for the broad audience, perceived as neutral and informative. With the definition given initially of conspiratorial design, I tried to highlight the tension between the aspiration to encompass a universal scope on a unitary consistent system and at the same time funnel that vision into a persuading synthesis. This same tension can at times appear evidently also in unexpected contexts. An example is We will be here – Map of the future, an infographic by Density Design that visualizes the results of a multiplayer online game developed by the Institute for the Future to try to forecast future challenges. Even the data visualizations of Francesco Franchi for Il Sole 24 Ore (the main Italian financial newspaper) display that same “opaqueness” described by Joanna Drucker when she says:

Most information visualizations are acts of interpretation masquerading as presentation. In other words, they are images that act as if they are just showing us what is, but in actuality, they are arguments made in graphical form. But paradoxically, the primary effect of visual forms of knowledge production in any medium […] is to mask the very fact of their visuality, to render invisible the very means through which they function as argument.

Data visualizations can create the perception of seeing the world from the control room. Under our eyes in the shape of numbers and graphs, everything in the world falls into place in the same, interconnected, coherent system. Conspiratorial design is ultimately the category of works that try to obtain an illusion of control.

Clearly, since this taxonomy is based also on intentions, that are ultimately unknowable, it is destined to remain open. Do some of the mentioned artifacts appear paranoid because their authors are unconsciously paranoid? Hard to tell. Let’s take the case of Mark Lombardi as an especially significant one. His work became so compelling in conspiratorial environments also because of some obscure aspects of his personal history. He was found dead in his house hanged by a rope, which was reported as a suicide even if some close to him found it hard to believe he would take his own life. There are some testimonies about some of his works being tampered after his death, which considering the nature of the works can raise the suspicion that someone tried to obfuscate a hypothetical big discovery. Lastly, some of his diagrams were consulted by some FBI agents soon after 9/11 for no specified reason. It’s unnecessary to say how much all of these elements fit into a perfect conspiracy theory. However, how we classify Mark Lombardi depends on the lens that we use to see his work. Was he a pioneering critical information designer, an ante litteram schizo-poster, or a saboteur of the state? I think this is open to debate. After this open-ended attempt to recognize conspiratorial design, I wish to analyze the essential ideas behind it, but only after a quick speculation on how the origins of these ideas can be related to design history.

Esoteric Traditions

In the attempt to trace back some of the seeds of contemporary conspiracism, it could be tempting to identify conspiratorial design just as a recent tendency, a deviation of design from its original noble tension for modernity and rationality. And if on the one hand, I think that the contemporary devaluation of the figure of the designer plays a role, on the other I think it’s more relevant to first look back in time and reconsider the idea that rationality is at the core of the discipline of design. In her Haunted Bauhaus,Elizabeth Otto documents how Bauhaus was far from the image that many have of it as an institution centered around functionality, rationality, and progress. Instead, it was rooted in the ethos of ‘Lebensreform’, a socio-cultural movement, very widespread in Germany at the time, that criticized the modern industrialized society and advocated for a return to a state of nature through different holistic and spiritualistic practices that included vegetarianism, naturopathy, and gymnastics. It’s not too implausible to think that even the notion of ‘Gestalt’ was so influential inside Bauhaus because it represented a theory of wholeness, very in line with its endeavor for mystic holism. Bauhaus molded an idea of the designer as a syncretic figure, a mediator, not simply between the industry and the arts, but somehow also between spirit and technique. This theoretical framework is probably what put the basis to the conception of the designer as someone who deals with everythingness, meaning that they can and want to manage every component of a system as well as the system in its entirety. Someone who can see how the parts sum up in a bigger whole. Some of these same ideas that inspired Bauhaus were very influential in the countercultures of the 1960s. Their diffusion was a necessary condition for the birth of ecological ideas that conceive Earth as one big interconnected system. This is also at the base of ideas like Buckminster Fullers’ ‘Spaceship Earth’ and the Whole Earth Catalog by Stewart Brand. In the catalogue of the exhibition Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, curator Andrew Blauvelt and the other contributors document the influences of figures like Fuller and Papanek in hippie countercultures, who were preoccupied with achieving global social justice and ecological awareness:

The hippies had a sense of purpose, of making the world anew. Modernism implied that human actions can create a better world, and this demanded an understanding of the whole in which actions take place—better, a critical understanding, which reconsidered the world-changing impact of Industrial capitalism.

Fuller was an interesting example of design’s optimistic view towards planetary-scale systems. He was not only convinced that such systems could exist but was actively putting forward the idea that it was the role of designers to take care of it. There is a quote in La speranza progettuale by Tomás Maldonado that captures Fuller’s optimism. There Maldonado writes about the widespread architectural infatuation for megastructures and quotes Fuller as the best example of what he addresses as the “old utopists”:

There can be enough energy and enough organizing capacity so that all men can possess the whole earth.

This idea of a sort of “mega-design” for a “megautopia” is the same represented recently in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis,where the main character, probably inspired by figures such as Robert Moses, is an almost godly architect who wants to turn New Rome (an alternate version of New York) in a utopia thanks to his ability to innovate and to his genius futuristic vision. With Papanek the idea that design has a responsibility towards society to act ecologically also shows in some of his diagrams, which are all-encompassing descriptions of how society functions as a whole. Much of the appeal of these diagrams comes precisely from the totalizing approach they display. Given the right context, they can appear either as the scribbles of a madman or as the unfolding reflections of an intellectual about society and its almost magical balance (sometimes actually referencing mystical symbols, like the Taijitu). The rise of ecological awareness was also the necessary ground for projects like The Limits to Growth,a report commissioned by the Club of Rome about exponential growth in a world with finite resources, which in recent times became an obsession of many conspiracy theories that see it as the perfect embodiment of the dreadful globalist elites pursuing a demonic anti-sovereigntism agenda. Some other examples of visual artifacts from that period that anticipated conspiratorial design are Dow Shalt Not Kill! U.S.A. - Union of Stoned Anarchists by Sture Johannesson, I Gerald Ford am the 38th Puppet of the United States by Emory Douglas and the project of the Knowledge Box by Ken Isaacs. The hippie countercultures of the 1960s were also the cultural humus of alternative epistemologies from which New Age movements emerged, and of which contemporary conspiracy theories are entrenched. The expression ‘hippie modernism’, coined by Blauvelt suggests a duality that sounds contradictory like the one that I propose with ‘conspiratorial design’. A good synthesis of the reason why I find such duality meaningful is expressed in an article by author Tommaso Guariento:

If we hold fast to the two teachings of the Corpus Hermeticum: that there is a Truth in the world, but it is concealed and that man aspires to liberation from his political, social and bodily shackles, we understand how, from the same Hermetic root, identity theories, victimhood, and racism, and emancipatory revolutionary forces can branch out.

I’m convinced that many aspects of contemporary culture are permeated by this spiritualist esoteric heritage. Not just design, as I briefly tried to suggest, but also many other enviroments, including of course conspiracy theories. We can notice this by observing how conspiracy theories embed various forms of mysticism and occultism, predicating the myth of an ancient epoch of greatness, in contrast to the pursuit, in contemporary society, of control through technology that suppresses our connection with the truth of the universe. We can observe it in the (just apparently) contradictory composition of QAnon followers, who adapted different spiritualist beliefs in a sort of magic conservatism. For example, it’s common in these contexts to find people who make traditionalist Christianity coexist with what we can consider as a sort of contemporary Lebensreform. The American alt-right is full of people who are, at the same time, promoting the importance of traditional Christian values to fight the alleged new wave of satanism and explaining how the healing power of crystals is a better alternative to the dangers of modern medicine. The contemporary chaotic cultural wars can be at least partially understood through some core ideas that have recurred throughout history and that were also key passages in the history of design. In other words, I think that, if 1960s utopist countercultures were the heirs of the ideas that inspired Bauhaus, contemporary conspiracy theorists are their deviated grandchildren.

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Filip Kostic’s artist lecture, Content Collapse, performed at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art on February 13, 2026 as part of the closing events for the exhibition IF/THEN co-curated by Sara Szostak and Marta Grytczuk.

In this artistic narrative, the artist moves between his work and reflections on digital culture—a space where images & memes, fictional characters, and political narratives coexist within a single, hyper-connected world. Part lecture, part performance, Content Collapse asks: what happens to our sense of meaning and perception when everything appears all at once?

For the exhibition, Filip exhibited a new series of works that contend with some of the ideas presented in this lecture. The work consists of eighteen diptych drawings titled Counter-Strike Spray Pattern Drawing #1-18, seven sculptures titled Pro Mouse Grip #1-7, and a sound work called Counter-Strike 1.6 being played in the other room, all made in 2025.

The hand sculptures are life castings done in collaboration with Sarah Sitkin in Los Angeles. The life casts are taken of Filip’s mouse hand while he holds a computer mouse in the positions of various professional competitive Counter-Strike players. The mouse is then removed and a cold-cast composed of Silicon rock powder, Copper powder, and resin composite is poured.

Counter-Strike Spray Pattern Drawing 1-18 are drawings of the bullet-spray pattern for every automatic weapon in Counter-Strike. The game has a mechanic in which the gun will recoil upwards as you hold the left mouse button down. It does this motion in a pattern that is gun specific and can be countered by a reciprocated mirrored motion of the mouse. Each diptych is the dot pattern made by the bullets, and the path of the mouse movement necessary to negate the movement. The drawings are mounted on a mousepad backing.

Explore Filip Kostic’s work further:

In his influential book, 9.5 Theses on Art and Class, Ben Davis lays out the provocative position that artists (particularly visual artists) are fundamentally ‘middle-class.’ This is not to say that artists can’t be (or often are not) poor; class is distinct from income. Rather than material wealth, it describes the relationship a person has to the means of production. An artist, who decides what she paints and labors on her own, resembles more closely the small business-owner rather than the wage-laborer. If a group of artists, for example, went on strike, the only people they would really hurt would be themselves (and maybe some flummoxed gallerists).

This position is provocative because art seems to exist in close proximity to political radicalism. Many artists choose to follow a precarious and ill-advised career path precisely because they are most sensitive to the alienating and exploitative forces in capitalism. As the trope would have it, they’d rather starve than sell out.

For those of us ‘creatives’ with left politics, it’s long been an open question what relation (if any) artistic work might bear on said politics. In the visual art domain, this topic has become only more polemical through the woke years, and there is still no conclusive resolution in sight. Yet there are other types of artists who labor under different conditions. As a classical musician, I would like to consider some personally familiar territory—the symphony orchestra. Whereas the solitary painter might bear little revolutionary potential, the collectivized musician presents richer lines of analysis.

Orchestra as Factory Floor

The traditional model of a symphony orchestra involves two main hierarchies: orchestra to audience, and conductor to orchestra. There are others of course, but let’s focus on these. In the first, the orchestra presents works of the canon, mixed sometimes with contemporary or lesser-known works, to a passive and silent audience. The reasons the audience has chosen to attend these concerts are largely mysterious. Some might be seeking to better themselves through ‘fine art,’ or else accompany a partner with such objectives. Others might be longtime fans of a particular composer or orchestral music in general. Others still might want the secular-religious experience of the concert hall, where you are compelled to sit in mute contemplation while taking in an aesthetic experience. Something you cannot do is buy the concert. You cannot store it in a humidity-controlled room in Switzerland: classical music is not an investment or a financial instrument, unlike many works of visual art.

Within the orchestra, the conductor is a dictator, enjoying something similar to the divine right of kings. There are ways for the orchestra to resist or subvert the conductor’s instructions, but this is mostly reserved for extreme cases of incompetence. Conductors are the only ones permitted to speak in rehearsals (with the exception of principal or lead players in a section, and those only sparingly), and their decisions are absolute. Some may seek to burnish their credibility by soliciting the input of the orchestra, but those who don’t still enjoy the same absolute power of fiat. Go faster, play quieter, etc. Even the choice of the programs is largely at the discretion of the conductor and very rarely related to the wishes of the orchestra.

At the same time, orchestral musicians have a long and fruitful history of labor organizing. This is because the nature of the work differs from that of visual artists. The conditions of labor in an orchestra are fundamentally social: 70+ musicians must all be present and all playing in harmony for the endeavor to succeed, not so different from the classic vision of the factory floor. Indeed, musicians sit in assigned chairs, so the issues with unionizing a particular ensemble are very similar to those of industrial workplaces. In both instances, the map of the shop floor plays a crucial role. One must organize the trombones separately from the percussionists. Because of these parameters (and the accordant alienation from finished product), orchestral musicians are closer to craftspeople or artisans.

Moreover, attempts to desocialize these ensembles have largely failed. In 2020, for example, many orchestras experimented with models that were ‘COVID-safe,’ including having individual musicians recording themselves on front-facing phone cameras and patching them together, or else sitting at comical distances from one another on huge concert stages. Neither of these methods survived beyond a year or two. The proximity and the simultaneous collaboration is the thing, conditions that should perk the ears of any good Marxist.

Equally notable are how orchestras situate within their urban contexts both physically and culturally. Symphony orchestras are bedrock cultural institutions in every city. They employ huge numbers of artists and administrators, and they draw in talent to live and work and make other artistic products. Their concert halls tend to be in the center of downtown, often adjacent to the financial or business heart of the city. Because of their unique structure, they also present unique opportunities for political and artistic organizing.

Radical Possibilities

Let’s consider three very different examples of radicalism, loosely defined, within the context of professional orchestras:

1. In 1995, a consortium of seven orchestras including the Metropolitan Opera debuted a ticketing platform which quickly became the industry standard. Think Ticketmaster for classical music. Tessitura is now a non-profit company and consortium of over 200 symphony orchestras. From a financial standpoint, the Met Opera Orchestra was both the group of musicians playing in the pit during Puccini performances and the digital ticketing platform that was a core part of its revenue. The financial existence of an orchestra is more elaborate than what you see on stage. The revenue from ticket sales, for example, maxes out at around 40% of the total revenue on an average orchestra balance sheet. The function and practical existence of any ensemble go beyond weekend night concerts presented under highly standardized aesthetic conditions. A cooperative ticketing platform easily grafted onto the core business. Rather than allowing ticket revenue to leech to third party platforms, Tessitura incorporated new technology to build the financial stability of the associated ensembles, something that shores up power for organized labor to be more aggressive in their demands.

2. In the Soviet Union, the Persimfans orchestra was founded in 1922 explicitly with the goal of upholding revolutionary values. Conductorless, the musicians sat in a circle facing each other, and decisions about the music-making were made as a group. By all contemporary accounts, the group produced concerts of the highest quality, as the musicians had to take greater individual responsibility in the production of the music. Sergei Prokofiev, one of the leading composers of his generation, collaborated with the group and praised the model highly. If you are a classical musician, you understand that Prokofiev’s music is some of the most difficult to perform. It took far longer to rehearse these performances though, and the group shuttered after 10 years (the project having less relevance, perhaps, in Stalin’s bureaucratic state). As an orchestral musician myself, I both sympathize with the desire to democratize the orchestra and understand the inefficiencies it must have entailed. There is a brute simplicity to following the conductor—it allows us to present a weekend of concerts after only three rehearsals. That isn’t to say other democratic models haven’t found ways around these problems, though.

3. The contemporary composer George Lewis frequently incorporates democratic structures into his compositions. In his 2018 piece P. Multitudinous, instrumentalists are split into seven factions, three of them ‘mobile,’ and they are provided with a musical score that looks like a bingo card. Each faction makes decisions about what to play, arriving at consensus through hand signals. Actions include “attempt to achieve unison through long sounds,” “play as fast as possible,” and chanting a line of text from Spinoza about the political legitimacy of commonwealths. Importantly, this isn’t an exercise in pure horizontalism. There is still a roaming conductor (two actually) who can give instruction to a particular faction. The conductors, like the rest of the instrumentalists, can’t speak, and the instrumentalists might elect to refuse the command. Most important, though, is a shared aesthetic commitment to the group sound, blending individual genius into a unified sonic environment. Lewis writes, “the performance is achieved through negotiation and consensus, and its success will be less a question of individual freedom than of the assumption of personal responsibility for the sonic environment.”

These examples present three different dimensions to radicalism: financial, organizational, and artistic. What they have in common is introducing democracy into the labor and ownership of the orchestra itself. A truly revolutionary project would involve all three.

Actually Existing Orchestras

In the U.S. there are several conductorless models (Orpheus and A Far Cry prominent among them), but the most promising ensemble in the country is without a doubt the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. This is not a measure of ideological extremism; there are other ensembles that are more aggressively political, for example. What’s notable about the SPCO is its material success. The Twin Cities are the only metropolitan area in the country that supports two full-time unattached professional orchestras, even though they are the 16th largest such area. This is in large part due to the radical vision of the SPCO. Without a Music Director (or permanent conductor) since 2003, they employ a model that combines a much higher degree of democratic participation that includes musician leaders with substantial artistic control. When they ditched the conductor, they also slashed ticket prices, opting for a ‘donor-first’ revenue model. This might seem like a recipe for ceding control to the donors with the deepest pockets, but the opposite has happened. The SPCO treats its entire audience as donors or potential donors. By drawing in younger audiences and soliciting smaller donations from larger numbers of people, they’ve developed a healthier and more robust balance sheet. It’s long been normal (at a time of declining audiences) for the SPCO to not only sell out shows, but to attract younger and more diverse crowds than practically any professional ensemble in the country.

The relationship between audience and orchestra is also transformed; it is typical for musicians to interact directly with audience members during and after shows, soliciting feedback and building relationships. The democratic ethos informs all aspects of the mission and the performances alike. The SPCO’s community presence in the Twin Cities is not to be understated: they’ve built a cultural institution that goes well beyond the traditional boundaries of orchestras.

One particularly interesting project is the Northside Celebration concerts that occurred until recently at the Capri Theater on Minneapolis’s historically Black north side. The orchestra joins local community leaders and musicians to present a mix of classical, gospel and spoken word. Importantly, the orchestra delegates extensive artistic control to community leaders, providing only musicians and resources to produce a concert that’s fundamentally of the community and for the community. The result is basically unrecognizable as an orchestral concert. The 2017 show was the only time I’ve been to a classical performance where the audience was overwhelmingly Black.

It is notable that the SPCO filled its audiences and its coffers by implementing a democratic model. The more important point, though, are the even more radical possibilities implicit in this story. The SPCO is able to experiment with risky projects because they’ve spent decades forming relationships with their community, which is the same as their donor base. Basically, the audience trusts them. That legitimacy allows and even encourages them to go beyond a narrowly defined mission. Throw a rock in a city and you’ll find an arts organization with a radical posture. Professional orchestras offer a level of structure and a bedrock community importance that these groups could only dream of. Because of the unique artistic and labor structure of an orchestra and its adjacency to civic life, it has a much greater potential for political organization than it might have seemed at first glance.

Orchestra as Dual Power

In the past decade, the orchestral world has been roiled by the broader political environment. Due to the intense culture of hierarchy, some of the most appalling instances of sexual abuse and misogyny unearthed during #metoo have come from the symphonic world. After the racial uprising in 2020, the call to modernize programs has been taken up across the country. The project to play marginalized composers, bring women into musical leadership roles, and diversify orchestras is in full swing. But these efforts—focused largely on optics and representation—miss the true potential of the organizations themselves.

What are some other uses for this institution? Orchestras, which are no stranger to labor actions and strikes, can be used as a megaphone for other labor activity. They can work in concert with other unions to message to the community and win the public over to the side of organized labor. Many orchestras rent the halls they play in, but a few own them outright. The spaces can be used for purposes of political organizing or education. Other assets often include tour busses and in-kind donations (i.e. old cars, legal services, etc.). The question isn’t the means but the political and organizational capacity.

Democratizing the SPCO strengthened the financial health of the organization, and it made the musicians and the community more active in the governance and direction of the ensemble. Both of these things amount to a type of consciousness raising, as musicians gain awareness of their class interests and audiences begin to understand themselves as a community, not just individual consumers. Oher ensembles should seek to follow suit. Right now, rampant financial difficulties and an alienated workplace make militant union action unlikely. But the AFM has a longstanding history of labor militancy that has ebbed since the second half of the 20^th century. Rebuilding the power of the orchestra itself would open the aperture for the conceivable political activity. Once upon a time, boycotts and strikes against the recording industry brought Hollywood to a standstill, and musicians held the line for years to ensure long-term compensation for their work. A newly energized musician’s union could wield its power in more diverse ways, building politically engaged arts networks, joining ongoing fights against ICE, and offering basic community services. It might seem like a stretch to look to the Black Panthers’ ‘Survival Programs,’ which included clothing distribution, legal aid, and most famously, free breakfast for children. These are endeavors you’re more likely to see in a local library, maybe, but there are clear similarities between the two. Both operate in large public spaces and have a civic mission. It is only a deficit of imagination that prevents orchestras from serving a more expansive community function, especially at a moment when that function is rarely served at all.

Collective bargaining has long resolved around issues of compensation, but a first step would be to include the democratization and even musician ownership of the orchestra in routine demands. Conductors, who are compensated at rates up to 20x the wages of musicians, must justify their worth to the orchestras. Musicians might consider the possibility of existing without a music director, or else find ways to fold conductors into the broader mass of musicians. All orchestras should be doing the work to evolve from niche cultural organizations to institutions serving the communities they exist in. Part of that is responding to local needs and desires. The Elgin Symphony (a group I am a member of) has in recent years brought in Mariachi bands and traditional Mexican dancers that have performed alongside the orchestra to sold out crowds (I might mention that Elgin, a Chicago suburb, has a large Hispanic population). It might seem like a modest starting point, but labor movements rely on community support. Developing popularity within those communities (especially from the working classes) is a prerequisite for anything bolder.

The revolutionary potential of the symphony orchestra is to fulfill the role implied by their centrality, longevity, and their longstanding unionized workplaces. The first step is necessarily to build that legitimacy and presence in the community. From there, the orchestra becomes a node from which all sorts of things can happen. The potential for laboring musicians themselves to manage and direct the subsequent activities is the truly exciting possibility. In truth, organizations like the SPCO have barely scratched the surface.

I am writing this for the Do Not Research blog, a community that trends much more toward the visual arts than the musical ones. Nevertheless, the analysis should be easily portable across a number of fields. For one, very few people make a living off selling the art they make to private buyers. Even successful artists maintain side hustles (or main hustles) in adjacent work performed for a wage (for instance: design, advertising, technical jobs, etc.). As mentioned in the introduction, the arts have long drawn the most radical contingents of a society. But sometimes the most radical thing one can do as an artist isn’t necessarily to make the most edgy work but to unionize their restaurant job. The idea behind calling visual artists ‘middle-class’ isn’t to cast aspersions, but to set some parameters. Power comes from leverage, and the power of an orchestra, for example, comes from the organization of its labor and its position in the community. It is from this material reality that the possibility of a vanguard orchestra emerges, one with a truly revolutionary objective. After all, what is a rapt audience of 1000 spiritually hungry people if not a wonderful opportunity?

This summer we are adding “Contemporary Art History” with artist and educator Andy Bennentt, who alongside Harris Rosenblum has facilitated internal art critique groups for the DNR discord community over the last two years.

After five years of independent reading groups, crit groups, film screenings, and more, we are taking on the task of educating the next cohort of artists and creatives. You can enroll today: view all DNR Spring 2026 courses here.

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All courses will take place on Discord. Students must be prompt in responding to onboarding emails and be prepared to use the platform.

Summer Bootcamp (Sundays)

INSTRUCTOR:
DATES: Sundays, 8/9, 8/16, 8/23, & 8/30
TIME: 1:00 - 3:00pm EST

Four week intensive course delving into the core ideas and questions explored in the foundational stages of DNR. We will examine artworks, texts, and online media covering topics: internet-informed identity, political futures, & post-internet art. Facilitated by artist Theresa Tomi Faison via Discord.

Enrollment is open today.

Summer Bootcamp (Mondays)

INSTRUCTOR:
DATES: Mondays, 8/10, 8/17, 8/24, & 8/31
TIME: 6:30 - 8:30pm EST

Four week intensive course delving into the core ideas and questions explored in the foundational stages of DNR. We will examine artworks, texts, and online media covering topics: internet-informed identity, political futures, & post-internet art. Facilitated by artist Theresa Tomi Faison via Discord.

Enrollment is open now.

Contemporary Art History

INSTRUCTOR: Andy Bennett
DATES: Tuesday, 8/11, 8/18, 8/25, 9/1
TIME: 6:30 - 8:30pm EST

This four-week course introduces students to ideas, artists, and debates in contemporary art through close readings of artworks, essays, and videos.The course is organized around four thematic problems that have reshaped artistic practice over the last fifty years: the relationship between art and life, the changing status of images, the materiality of moving images, and contemporary developments beyond post-internet art.

Enrollment is open today. Space is limited.

Find all DNR Fall courses here.

“The materials covered in the course clearly explicate our current political and institutional stagnation and decay, and through discussion provide possible ways forward. In addition to politically grounded texts, Tomi’s careful curation of artworks shown in class highlights artists reacting to, and not escaping from, our current cultural realities. This class is highly relevant to anyone interested in ultra-contemporary art, our psycho-political moment, and how those intersect. It was a privilege being a member of the first cohort; I cannot recommend it enough.”

— Nate De La Cruz, former student from DNR Summer 25: Bootcamp

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In the above image, rapper Skrilla wears “The Mask of Bobobja” which I designed and embroidered for the Philadelphia-based textile collective Chalk.Press in October 2022. After sitting largely untouched for nearly three years the mask was sold to a close associate of Skrilla, who later gifted it to him in the middle of 2025. Skrilla began wearing the mask incessantly in music videos, interviews, and instagram photos, transforming it into a symbol of his own identity.

Skrilla, born Jemille Edwards in 1999, is a drill rapper born in Kensington, a neighborhood in Northern Philadelphia. Skrilla is also the father of the “6-7” meme which, at the time of this writing in December 2025, has reached a hyper-viral crescendo across multiple online platforms. The phrase originates from the song “Doot Doot” in which Skrilla drops the two numbers in quick succession. The meme has also spilled paroxysmally into the real world, where subjects (usually children) who encounter the numbers immediately yell them out loud. While the “6-7” meme is not unique in its absurdity or popularity, it is notable for its complete flight away from its original genesis: the children blurting out “6-7” in math class are not referencing Skrilla, the song “Doot Doot”, or any other individual meme. Rather, the two numbers have vaporized themselves into a floating body of non-meaning to be internalized and repeated via automatic response. Generation Alpha, undoubtedly the primary actor here, has pioneered a form of memetic signification that points only to itself .

This lack of a concrete genealogy has led to ample speculation as to what “6-7” truly means. Fans of Skrilla and drill music will point to 67th street in his native Philadelphia, the burying of a body 6’ 7” underground, or the Philadelphia police code for a homicide “10-67”. NBA fans would point to Lamelo Ball’s height and his early adoption of the meme. For a certain side of Christian TikTok, Skrilla’s practice of Santeria makes “6-7” a satanic chant. Conspiratorial numerologists arrive at a similar conclusion using gematria (Satanic = 67, “Doot Doot” reduced = 36 = triangle number 666, 6 + 7 = 13 = Judas). For the less online, casual media consumer, especially one older than gen Z, “6-7” is basically an inside joke among children. Finally, if you ask Skrilla himself, he will vaguely state that the meaning of “6-7” is “changing a negative into a positive”.

Because the actual use of “6-7” reaches such a high level of alienation from any one of these interpretations it produces an environment where they are all correct, a position which is aided by the meme consisting of numbers rather than an image. Unlike numbers, images can be definitively traced, analyzed, and deconstructed. Perhaps the best example of an adjacent number-meme would be the Numogram, which defies satisfactory explanation due to its completely self-contained mathematical function. The Numogram was created in the late 1990’s by the CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit), a loose group at Warwick University that included academics, writers, and artists and which concerned itself with how the oncoming computer age could be creatively engaged. The CCRU used the Numogram to generate a massive quantity of fictions, analyses, theories, conspiracies, ideologies, and coincidences in the space provided by its hermetical non-meaning, a process that closely resembles what has occurred with “6-7”. Both these number-memes are retrocausal: their own history is auto-manufactured within a void where prior meaning should exist. This slippery and fertile territory thwarts the domination of a single crystallized narrative, allegory, or myth while simultaneously creating a rich biome for their infectious production.

The ties between the Numogram and “6-7” go deeper. When I first embroidered the mask I placed a small fly between the eyeholes, a central position above the rest of the embroidery. After finishing the skeletal teeth, nostrils, and accents around the eyeholes and chin, I remember feeling that the mask needed some sort of unifying symbol. A fly seemed fitting: small yet striking and relevant to a skull, its inclusion on the mask was purely aesthetic. Coincidentally, the entity associated with the numbers 6 and 7 in the CCRU’s Pandemonium Codex (which assigns demonic identities to distances between numbers within the Numogram) is the “Lord of the Flies”, also known as “Beelzebub” or “Bobobja”. I only discovered this synchronicity this year, and had no knowledge of the CCRU when the mask was first made. The full entry from the Pandemonium Codex is transcribed below:

Mesh-27. Bobobja (Bubbles, Beelzebub (Lord of the Flies)). Heavy Atmosphere Pitch Cth-5 Net-Span 7::6 Amphidemon of Teeming Pestilence. 7th Phase-limit Decadology. C/tp-#5, Mj- [5S]. Rt-1:[7236] Strange lights in the swamp (dragonflies, ET frog-cults). [+1 sub-Rt]. Rt-2:[7256] Swarmachines (lost harvests).

Note: Net-Span notates the two numbers that the demon exists between, always starting with the higher number. Bobobja’s net-span is [7::6].

The mask, Skrilla’s song “Doot Doot”, and the Numogram seem to have collaborated independently without the presence of their creators, producing “6-7” as connective tissue. The virality of the meme becomes evidence of nervous communication between separate bodies and it is here that Skrilla transforms into more of a host than an author. After all, Beelzebub, or the Lord of the Flies, is depicted not as a singular being but instead as a swarm whose central locus is whatever corpse it is eating.

Philosopher and former CCRU member Reza Negrastani writes that “...the body of Beelzebub (ba’al zebub) insinuates a legion of flies, with their perverse collective enthusiasm to come together over a fresh deliquescing carrion or a yellowish lump of excrement...” (Negarastani, Reza, “The Legion: Warmachines, Predators and Pests”, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, re.press 2008, p. 114). Similarly, the Lord of the Flies in William Golding’s novel of the same name is manifested by the decaying head of a pig on a spike that summons a “...black blob of flies that buzzed like a saw” (Golding, William, “Gift for the Darkness”, Lord of the Flies, Faber & Faber 1954, p. 138). Beelzebub exists as an activity or process in which the molar (corpse) both attracts and repels the molecular (swarm). This dialogue is mutually profitable as it allocates something to each party which it respectively could not achieve for itself. The corpse regains the movement of life at the cost of its static, peaceful mode of being and the swarm is given sustenance in exchange for its submission to the centrality of the One (pig-head). This positive feedback loop ends when the One is totally devoured, at which point the swarm must seek out a new carcass to devour. Beelzebub and memetics are both truly viral: they reproduce parasitically. In this context the mask becomes less of a stylistic choice and more of a tool to facilitate contact.

If you listen to the rest of Skrilla’s discography, it becomes clear that he intentionally fosters this relationship. Motifs of possession, sacrifice, revelation, divination, and, most importantly, zombification riddle his lyrics, usually placed within reference to Santeria. He has dubbed himself “the face of zombieland” in reference to Kensington, a neighborhood in Northern Philadelphia where Skrilla grew up and which is home to the East Coast’s largest open-air drug market. Skrilla raps frequently about Kensington, where he simultaneously sells and consumes opioids alongside fellow addicts. These addicts often appear as actors and hypemen in his videos, exhibiting a clickbaiting and intentionally inflammatory vibe that Skrilla certainly endorses. However, the actuality of a successful rapper presenting himself as someone similarly embedded in brutal addiction is rather atypical. In an interview on No Jumper, a rap-centric Youtube channel, Skrilla states “They’re [addicts] actually my friends... they watched me grow up... I’ve been serving 80% of them since I was a kid”. Self-recognition infiltrates and complicates the traditional dealer-addict binary relationship Skrilla is expected to have with Kensington. Usually, discussions around selling drugs in hip-hop are framed by the conflict that arises from providing for yourself at the cost of others given the absence of any other opportunity. This hyper-individualizes the drug dealer by biochemically, economically, and mentally othering the addict, who exists as part of a horde or swarm driven by mindless desire: a zombie. Skrilla subverts this dynamic by inhabiting both roles at once, becoming a zombie haunted by individual consciousness: “They be living walking dead and they be serving zombies/ I’m a zombie too addicted to them percocets” (Skrilla, “Block Hot”, Kutthroat, 2022).

In his book Undead Uprising, John Cussans coins the phrase “Zombie Complex” and uses it to dissect the modern zombie figure, tracing its philosophical and political history in relation to xenophobic Western depictions of Haitian Vodou:

The Zombie Complex then refers to a range of ethical, psychological and political thought-problems clustered around the central figure of the living-corpse which, though ostensibly fictional, stubbornly reminds us of the horribly actual limits (or lack of limits) of humanity, the individual and the human. (Cussans, John. “Preface: The Zombie Complex”, Undead Uprising, Strange Attractor Press, 2017 p. iv)

If the Zombie Complex concerns the articulation of the boundaries of the human, zombie consciousness emerges as a cooperative form of praxis that attempts to transcendentally blur the frontier. For Skrilla, the practice of Santeria and its religious appeal to spirits is the primary motor of this process. Santeria, developed under similar conditions in neighboring Cuba, shares many of the same beliefs, practices, and rituals (spiritual possession, animal sacrifice, ancestor veneration) as Haitian Vodou. These are distinct and syncretic religions, combinations of Catholicism and West African Animism, and though the zombi or nganga is originally a Vodou concept the ideas of soul-snatching, possession, and subjugation that it represents are equally present within Santeria. In many of his lyrics, Skrilla references and appeals to Orishas, or spirits, which speak and act through him: “Elegua gon’ live through me and Ogun gon’ live through my cutter” (Skrilla, “Soul Snatchin” 2025). Their veneration provides power and knowledge: “I don’t pray to God, I don’t fear Allah, Shouts out my Orishas, I know how ima die” (YoungBagChasers, Skrilla, Ybcdul, “YBC KTC”, Us Against The World 2023), “I don’t know why Ogun gave a rude awakening, but I’m awoke,” (Skrilla, “Chiraq”, Zombie Love Kensington Paradise UMG Recordings 2024). Elegua is the deity of choice and beginning, associated with crossroads and the opening of doors. Ogun represents metalworking, war, civilization, and technology. By allowing himself to be possessed by higher powers, representatives of the extra-human, Skrilla’s zombie consciousness escapes the vicious dialectic of identity enforced by racialized American narco-poverty. In being both consumer and supplier, swarm and individual, zombie and man, Skrilla transcends the limited economy of contradiction that violently asserts austerity, one which tranquilizes and polices entire communities like Kensington under the guise of natural market forces. When reality becomes foreclosed by cold financial logic then the only path of exit lies in submission to something spiritual, something alogical which surpasses a material framework. Thus the zombie figure possesses within itself space for new sentience, one that collides human interiority and exteriority without negating either.

Bobobja or Beelzebub is a warp-amphidemon, meaning it links the Time-Circuit of the Numogram (made up of numbers 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, and 8) with the Warp (3 and 6). Demons, in the CCRU cosmology, are not moralized in a theistic framework and have no implicitly negative or positive qualities. Rather, they exist as manifestations of relationships, associations, and gaps between numbers. Expanding this definition literally demonizes all systems that numbers touch; algorithms, networks, capital, etc. Amphidemons are identified as mediums of communication between the inside and outside of the Time-Circuit, trafficking with the incomprehensible, the inhuman. In donning the Mask of Bobobja, Skrilla seems to have opened a gateway of unknowing, one that can twist even the most basic unit of rationality - numbers - into bizarre aliens. While each theory about the origins or meaning of “6-7” might be correct, this is only the case because none of them ultimately matter. “6-7” is here, it works, it functions, and it easily evades any attempt to cage it with meaning. Eventually “6-7” will fade into irrelevancy; it will stop being funny like all memes do, probably well before the time this is published. This entropy death will likely be welcomed by many, those weary with confusion and nostalgic for a time when media felt more rationally digestible. Unfortunately for them, “6-7” leaves behind no antibodies, and novel infections are inevitable when it is impossible to understand what exactly is spreading.

Though I have never met or talked to Skrilla, I feel there is a shared experience in witnessing our respective creations collaborate on a scale that surpasses either of us. This is not to claim any sort of credit, influence, or ownership over Skrilla’s work or the meme. Rather, it has been incredibly striking to witness how releasing something into the world gives it complete autonomy: artistic intent is nearly irrelevant when connections between objects, media, narratives, and memes can form themselves without consent. This is especially easy in such an accelerated and ubiquitous digital environment, one that flattens the institutional barriers which traditionally dictated how work was disseminated. A consequence of this flattening is that previously exalted positions of artist or art object dissolve into undifferentiated content, information-fodder for the internet to relentlessly share. And though I enjoy Skrilla’s music, his use of the mask, and the hilarity of “6-7”, I cannot help but feel haunted by the omnipresence of a machine that erases any possibility of creating alone.

Strange online behaviors often mirror patterns long present offline, amplified by digital platforms. Phenomena like Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) faking, while a bizarre and excessive symptom of internet life, enacts familiar social logics long observed in historic expressions of the hysterical, including the performance of culturally intelligible distress, the formation of intense social bonds, and the contestation of institutional authority. When considered through the lens of the hysterical—as established in historical, anthropological, and psychological perspectives—what appears anomalous is really a traceable response to the current cultural moment, reflecting the commodification of identity, atomization of community, and suspicion of expertise.

Building on interdisciplinary understandings of hysteria and its core social functions, in this essay I use ethnographic material gathered in 2025 from the subreddit r/SystemsCringe to show how DID faking follows a recognizable hysterical logic. Seen in this way, online DID faking appears less as an anomaly and more as a coherent response to the conditions of the present, embodying defining features of contemporary life. Extreme phenomena like online DID faking, while on one hand performative and irrational, are often an expression of established social logics that can tell us the most about the conditions that produced them.

Hysteria as a Moving Cultural Framework

Hysteria is best understood as a recurring social logic that adapts to dominant threats, information environments, and structures of authority. Throughout history, behaviors labelled as ‘hysterical’ have shifted in form and explanation, not because the underlying dynamics disappeared, but because each era rearticulated them within its own vocabulary. As Bartholomew and Wessely note, hysteria “flourishes where the threat has a basis in reality”¹. What counts as a threat and what reality looks like, changes with time and context.

In the Greco-Roman world, hysteria was famously explained through the metaphor of the ‘wandering womb’ reinforcing assumptions about female instability and sexual deficiency. During the Middle Ages, similar behaviors were recoded as demonic possession or witchcraft, shifting explanation from bodily dysfunction to moral and spiritual corruption.

By the Renaissance, the hysterical was increasingly located in disorders of the brain rather than the soul, reflecting a broader centering of scientific thought, and laying the groundwork for the later development of psychiatry.

In the twentieth century, hysteria became Mass Psychogenic Illness, marking a “shift in attention from the individual to a collective hysterical body”. Anxieties produced by industrialization, chemical warfare, and technological threats produced hysteria based on fears of environmental contamination: tainted food, polluted air, unidentified odors. The content of the symptoms changed, but the structure remained consistent: collective distress circulating through socially plausible danger.

Digital Hysteria

If hysteria has historically adapted to prevailing threats and information systems, its contemporary expression is inseparable from the digital media environment. The current cultural and communication landscape amplifies susceptibility to social contagion. The fundamental alterations in communication brought about by social media have shaped how distress spreads, producing what researchers now describe as Mass Social Media Induced Illness. Whereas previously, physical proximity was thought to be required to spread episodes of hysteria, it has now been established that contagion can be spread by digital exposure alone.

In 2019, a young German content creator, Jan Zimmerman, gained popularity with a YouTube account Gewitter in Kopf, which documented his life with apparent Tourettes syndrome. Experts had confirmed the tics were not the result of Tourettes, and major support organizations for the disorder distanced themselves from Zimmerman, claiming his content was providing an inaccurate portrayal of the disorder. Within 3 months, he had over 1 million subscribers and was the top breakout creator in 2019. His rise in popularity was accompanied by a sharp increase in presentations of Tourette’s-like tic symptoms in young people in Germany, with no history of Tourettes, which is diagnosed in childhood, and not meeting diagnostic criteria for the syndrome.

Researchers internationally have now found evidence of a significant rise in presentations of sudden-onset, complex, and significantly disruptive tics with atypical and non-diagnosable features, attributed to social media consumption⁶.

In a predominantly online environment, distress is performed, monetized, and validated through visibility. Social media collapses boundaries between private suffering and public identity, allowing culturally recognizable symptoms to circulate at unprecedented speed, enhanced by the social capital gained by performing suffering in a culture that centers trauma.

Cultural Meanings of the Hysteric

Anthropologically, hysteria has been thought to perform three core cultural functions, which recur across historical and social contexts.

Firstly, it is a culturally shaped expression of suffering: a means of articulating otherwise inexpressible psychological or social distress using the idioms, symptoms, and narratives made available by a given cultural moment. Because hysterical symptoms are psychosomatic and socially contagious, their form reflects prevailing anxieties, making hysteria a mirror of collective fear.

Secondly, hysteria operates as a mode of social bonding and identity formation. Shared symptoms, specialized language, and ritualized practices create communities organized around mutual recognition, transforming often marginal or stigmatized experiences into sources of belonging and meaning. In this way, hysterical formations produce social spaces in which individuals define themselves in contrast to dominant norms and sustain relationships through shared affliction.

Finally, hysteria has long functioned as a challenge to authority, particularly medical, political, and economic. Anthropological accounts describe how episodes of spirit possession among women working on Malaysian factory floors expressed refusal in exploitative labor environments⁷. Similar dynamics appear in descriptions of nevra among Greek immigrant women in Montreal, where psychosocial symptoms gave voice to the pressures of industrial labor, gendered expectation, and economic precarity⁸.

Taken together, these three meanings position hysteria as a culturally sanctioned mode of expression, community creation, and resistance, that repeatedly re-emerges in new forms as social conditions, information environments, and authority structures change.

The Online DID Community

The online Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) community is an expansive digital ecosystem across thousands of Discord servers, Aminos, YouTube channels, subreddits, and TikToks. Self-identified DID creators document their daily lives, relationships, and symptoms to audiences numbering in the hundreds of thousands or more, often monetizing their content through advertising and subscription platforms. There are over 7000 Discord public servers tagged ‘system friendly’, and thousands more private. As of May 2023, videos with the hashtag #DID have been viewed a total of 2.7 billion times and #dissociativeidentitydisorder videos had been viewed 1.5 billion times (TikTok no longer publishes information on the view count per hashtag)⁹. Like many internet subcultures, the DID community operates less as a single group than as a constellation of micro-communities, each with its own norms and leaders. Many individual communities are closed, requiring referrals or selection, proliferating the sense of belonging when one ‘makes’ it in.

Members use specialized vocabulary: describing themselves as “systems,” composed of multiple “alters,” each with distinct personalities, roles, and histories. Alters may be “fictives,” based on fictional characters, or “littles,” child personalities that require protection. The “host” is the alter most frequently in control, while “fronting” refers to which alter is currently active. Systems typically refer to themselves collectively as “we”. In many communities, self-diagnosis (“self-dx”) is widely accepted and often encouraged.

r/SystemsCringe

Given the breadth of this landscape, I focus on a single node: the subreddit r/SystemsCringe. Unlike pro-DID spaces, it is explicitly skeptical, bringing together users with personal experience of faking, or close connections to those who have, to document and critique alleged cases. By aggregating testimonies from across the wider ecosystem, the subreddit offers critical awareness of the inconsistencies and dangers of faking, alongside an understanding of its appeal, making it a valuable site for observing how DID identities are performed and policed.

I spent one month engaging with r/SystemsCringe as both a passive observer and an active participant. I identified myself as a researcher and invited users to share their experiences, particularly those who had previously identified as fakers or had been closely involved in DID communities.

Rather than evaluating the authenticity of individual claims, my analysis asks whether the self-diagnosis and performance of dissociative identity disorder operates as a modern hysterical formation.

Across my observation of and participation within r/SystemsCringe, a recurring theme was that individuals labelled as ‘fakers’ were experiencing genuine distress, and DID provided a socially intelligible explanation for this. One user stated that “having a disorder like DID gives them an ‘excuse’ to behave erratically” (anonymous user, direct message). Another reflected: “I was going through a rough time, and I didn’t feel like I was good at anything or important to anyone. ‘Having’ these disorders was a way to make me feel special, interesting, and valid” (anonymous user, public post).

Several participants emphasized that faking was not always a conscious or malicious act. As one user explained, “A lot of people are not intentionally faking. Whether it be dissociative PTSD [Post Traumatic Stress Disorder], BPD [Borderline Personality Disorder], or just general dissociation, many people will want to find answers for what is wrong with them and end up convincing themselves that they have DID” (anonymous user, direct message).

Beyond individual expression, participants consistently emphasized the sense of belonging these spaces provided. One user remarked, “A lot of what I’ve gathered is people do it for community—the community around these disorders is very tight-knit, they all watch for each other and it’s almost like a club”. Another similarly concluded, “I think they really just wanted a sense of community”. Adopting a DID identity functions not only as an explanation of personal distress, but as an act of community affiliation.

Community leaders and members actively encourage identification with the disorder, reinforcing boundaries between insiders and outsiders and the community identity. One user noted, “If you ever questioned if you had DID, immediately you would have people telling you that you had it” (anonymous user, public post). Another reflected on the difficulty of disengaging: “Every time I was close to getting out of my faking, the people on the server would convince me I was a system” (anonymous user, public post). The community itself becomes invested in maintaining the disordered identity, as it is the primary basis for social cohesion.

This dynamic also reproduces a third defining feature of historical hysteria: resistance to institutional authority, particularly medical expertise. Discussions on r/SystemsCringe frequently described community leaders positioning themselves as more legitimate than trained professionals. One user recalled:

“The staff acted like they were better than psychologists and doctors. If the new owner said Partial DID wasn’t real, it wasn’t real, even though it’s in the ICD. If the new owner said OSDD1-A causes a system, it must be true, even if that’s not what the DSM says... The staff would also encourage people to ‘defrag,’ which meant making your alters even more distinct and separate. It was pretty much the opposite of integration/healing.”

This illustrates how online DID communities construct alternative regimes of truth, rejecting or reinterpreting psychiatric classifications in favor of internally generated standards. Clinical goals such as integration are reframed as harmful, while practices that intensify dissociation are encouraged, further distancing members from mainstream treatment.

The defiance towards medical authority also extends to diagnostic processes themselves. As another user explained:

“Everyone wanted to get diagnosed with DID, even though they were pro-self-dx. Several people shopped and lied until they got a DID diagnosis, even though they had been previously told many times by doctors that they didn’t have DID. The staff would also coach people on how to deceive their doctors to get a DID diagnosis.”

Here, self-diagnosis and diagnostic manipulation are functioning as acts of resistance, allowing individuals to reclaim authority over identity formation while rejecting professional gatekeeping.

Conclusion

At first glance, online DID faking can easily be dismissed as a strange product of internet culture, driven by misinformation and identity performance. Such an interpretation, while not incorrect, obscures the interesting elements of the phenomenon. When approached through an anthropological understanding of hysteria, DID faking appears not simply as a bizarre aberration of the digital age, but as a culturally intelligible response to contemporary conditions, that echoes the historical role hysteria has played for those positioned outside the mainstream.

The apparent strangeness of online DID faking is less a reflection of individual pathology than of the cultural paradigm in which it emerges. In a social world organized around visibility and performative authenticity, but marked by institutional distrust and social fragmentation, distress must be made legible through recognisable narratives to be acknowledged at all. The DID community functions as a space capable of recognizing and validating forms of distress that might otherwise remain unseen or misunderstood.

Historically, hysteria has surfaced most often among those whose suffering lacks an authorized language- women, laborers, and marginalized groups whose experiences sit outside dominant institutions and frameworks. The online DID community continues this pattern. Rather than signalling a departure from historical precedent, it demonstrates how hysteria adapts when institutional recognition is scarce and digital platforms become the primary sites through which identity is negotiated.

Bartholomew, Robert E. ‘Public Health, Politics and the Stigma of Mass Hysteria: Lessons from an Outbreak of Unusual Illness’. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 109, no. 5 (2016): 175–79.

Shetty, Siddharth,. Chandini, Sharol Fernandes, and Safeekh A. T. ‘Hysteria: A Historical Perspective’. Archives of Medicine and Health Sciences 8 (February 2021).

Braun, Johanna. ‘Mass Hysteria’. Zeitschrift für Geschlecterforschung und Visuelle Kultur. 70 (2022)

Bartholomew, Robert E, Simon Wessely, and G James Rubin. ‘Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Social Network: Is It Changing the Pattern of Outbreaks?’ Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 105, no. 12 (2012): 509–12;

Müller-Vahl, Kirsten R., Anna Pisarenko, Ewgeni Jakubovski, and Carolin Fremer. ‘Stop That! It’s Not Tourette’s but a New Type of Mass Sociogenic Illness’. Brain: A Journal of Neurology 145, no. 2 (2022): 476–80.

Amorelli, Gabriel, Davide Martino, and Tamara Pringsheim. ‘Rapid Onset Functional Tic-Like Disorder Outbreak: A Challenging Differential Diagnosis in the COVID-19 Pandemic’. Journal of the Canadian Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry = Journal De l’Academie Canadienne De Psychiatrie De L’enfant Et De L’adolescent 31, no. 3 (2022): 144–51.

Frey, Jessica, Kevin J. Black, and Irene A. Malaty. ‘TikTok Tourette’s: Are We Witnessing a Rise in Functional Tic-Like Behavior Driven by Adolescent Social Media Use?’ Psychology Research and Behavior Management 15 (2022): 3575–85.

Hartung, Kathrin, Carolin Klages, Carolin Fremer, et al. ‘Prevalence of Mass Social Media-Induced Illness Presenting with Tourette-like Behavior in Germany between 2019 and 2021’. Journal of Psychiatric Research 177 (September 2024): 234–38.

Ong, Aihwa. Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia. State University of New York Press (1987).

Lock, Margaret. ‘On Being Ethnic: The Politics of Identity Breaking and Making in Canada, or, Nevra on Sunday’. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 14, no. 2 (1990): 237–54.

Salter, Michael, Bethany L. Brand, Matt Robinson, Rich Loewenstein, Joyanna Silberg, and Marilyn Korzekwa. ‘Self-Diagnosed Cases of Dissociative Identity Disorder on Social Media: Conceptualization, Assessment, and Treatment’. Harvard Review of Psychiatry 33, no. 1 (2025): 41–48.

The “Bloop” an underwater recording from 1997, attracted certain attention from both scientific and supernatural, cryptozoology communities. The sound was recorded by NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) using the SOSUS (Sound Surveillance System) hydrophone network, originally developed by the U.S. military during the Cold War to detect Soviet submarines. The recording captured a massive, ultra-low frequency sound spanning a distance of over 3,219 kilometers.¹

According to NOAA seismologist Robert Dziak, the original sound was a frequency rising lasting about one minute.2 The version circulating online is a 162k wav file, processed at 16 times its original speed, which raises the pitch and makes the sound more like a “bloop”.

Perhaps due to the organic, eerie—or even ‘cute’—quality of the sound, and its amplitude, which was far greater than that of the largest known marine creature, the blue whale, many speculated that the sound came from a massive, unknown underwater being. Adding to the theatrical background, the sound’s geographical source was calculated near the South Pacific’s coordinates of 50° 0′ 0′′ S, 100° 0′ 0′′ W, west of the southern Chile. This location is close to the fictional lost city of R’lyeh from H.P. Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulhu, where the famous ancient entity Cthulhu is said to be imprisoned. The coincidence (or not) added fuel to the theory that the Bloop was linked to a mysterious sea monster.

Years later, NOAA researchers compared the Bloop’s frequency spectrum with recordings collected in Antarctica between 2005 and 2010 and attributed the sound to an icequake caused by Antarctic glacier activity.3 The scientific explanation, however, did little to diminish the cultural fascination surrounding the Bloop.

Discussions about mysterious creatures or phenomena often fixate on the tedious debate over whether these creatures exist or not. However, the potential of researching undefined mysterious creatures lies not in proving their existence, but in understanding how they become projections of our imagination, and what they symbolize culturally, socially, and politically. The Bloop is an example that demonstrates how, although scientific research has demystified the phenomenon, its cultural and imaginative significance as a medium for speculation remained intact.

In 2017, a popular Reddit post titled Leviathans was uploaded by user ColdCoffee1775 on the NoSleep forum. The post, written from the first-person perspective of a member of a research team, describes an encounter with a sea monster during an expedition off the coast of Chile. The creature is described as: “It was massive. It had to be at least 500 feet in length. It was similar to a humpback whale in shape, but it’s head was rounder and it’s mouth was filled with sharp teeth like an orca’s. It’s side fins had webbed fingers, like some sort of primordial amphibian. The creature had to be some ancient survivor of a bygone era. At least it used to be. The creature itself was not the most terrifying aspect, however. The creature lay on its side. It’s eyes were glassy. I could see swarms of crabs and other deep sea creatures picking at it. As I moved the submersible sideways across the length of the leviathan, I noticed something that gave me chills. The mid-section of the beast was torn almost in half. Marks of what were all too obviously left by teeth of staggering proportions were clearly seen. The scars of a titanic struggle. The creature, as incredibly large as it was, had been killed by something much, much bigger.”4 Although the author doesn’t directly claim that the creature or its killer is the Bloop, the possibility is implied.

Then, in 2023, the YouTube channel Borisao Blois uploaded a CGI animation titled Colosos - The Bloop vs El Gran Majá - La Batalla,5 featuring a battle between the Bloop and another mythical sea monster, El Gran Majá. The video gained over 90 million views, and the visual depiction of the Bloop closely matched the description from the Reddit post—a massive whale-like creature with sharp teeth. After this video went viral, platforms like YouTube and TikTok saw a sudden surge in Bloop-themed content, ranging from Godzilla vs. Bloop cartoons to various Bloop simulation videos.

From the imagination of underwater recording to uncanny memes, the origin story of the bloop does not derive from traditional folklore passed down orally in a village or from a one-sided monologue by a terrified witness. Instead, it lurks in the corners of the internet, before being dug up and rediscovered by algorithms. It is a multithreaded phenomenon, a digital mythology of the Anthropocene—woven by cryptid forums, fan fictions, remix and parody videos, as well as large-scale copy-paste content farms.

This mythology is sustained by extensive infrastructure networks of servers, data centers, satellites and submarine cables that directly or indirectly drive climate change, global warming, and iceberg activities. Compared to the unknown underwater creature, the reality of climate change is even more invisible and disconcerting. Within the icequake recording of the “Bloop”, what is revealing what, and who is disclosing whom? This becomes a recursive question. What is the origin of the “Bloop”?

Jussi Parikka suggests in Deep times and media mines: A descent into the ecological materiality of technology that “media technologies are, in short, ways of making sense of the earth (surveying, visualizing, informationalizing, quantifying, modeling, simulating) as well as being enabled by it—from electromagnetic communications to the minerals we extract to make cars and computers work.”, media and geology are intertwined, feeding off each other.6 In the Anthropocene, ecology and culture cannot be discussed separately, and undefined creatures, as speculative narratives, reside at the intersection of ecological, cultural and media studies. As the Bloop “roams” the South Pacific online, vast amounts of data are being transmitted back and forth through the submarine cables, emitting their own low frequencies, and creating their own voices of sea monsters.

In the Bloop, we hear not just a climate phenomenon, an imagination of Cthulhu mythos, or internet artifacts, but also the submarine cables are cyborg sea serpents, and the hydrophones are tentacles of a giant monster. Sea monsters can be a powerful medium linking mythology stories, military agendas, undersea industry, climate change, internet forums and media platforms into a complex ecosystem, unfolding multiple narratives.

We are excited to announce Research Projects, a new collaborative venture and gallery program based in Mexico City. RP will provide research and exhibition opportunities for a curated group of Do Not Research contributors and community members.

Research Projects is a collaboration between Do Not Research, led by Harris Rosenblum, and clubhouse 88, a Mexico City-based gallery that has facilitated exhibitions, residencies, and social practice activations of offsite spaces since 2021. The project is co-directed by Ulises Olvera-Arroyo and Galia Basail-Mulcahy.

From 2026 to 2027, exhibitions will be hosted across two storefronts on the 14th floor of Plaza Izazaga 89 in Mexico City’s historic city center. The 16-story building was originally built to host an ill-conceived designer mall in the 1970s. Eventually, it was purchased by the state and served as a government building before being sold off to private investors. In the time since, it has operated as a market for pirated goods, and is now managed by a Chinese corporation that connects Mexican producers to China’s manufacturing capacity through dropshipping and e-commerce. Works will be shown down the hall from injection molded brainrot figurines, bluetooth speaker companies, and 3D printing businesses. We believe the backdrop of the site’s transition from windfall neoliberalism to hypercommerce is a perfect venue to show artists from the DNR ecosystem.

For its inaugural exhibition, opening: July 4th, 14:00-19:00, Research Projects will be presenting a collection of photographic works from David Noel and Trevor Paglen. The works in this show are both different routes of exploring the hyperreality generated by military technology. The UFO in Paglen’s work functions as a social technology to weaponize images in a way that inoculates the public from organizing around greater truths of military imperialism and capital dominion.

The technology of the computationally determined image is itself a military technology. Generative AI relies on the backbone of the earliest neural nets developed at MIT which in turn led to cognitive science as a discipline. According to the lore, the first computer vision model was a “tank detector,” and researchers in the 1960s believed general artificial intelligence was only a few years away. We come to a point now where the reality of images, intelligence, and systems are determined by capital, completely. The image technology that begins as a detector serves to modulate the truth value of images, entirely.

Noel’s work explores the usage of third generation surplus military optics as lenses. This generation of optical devices acts as a self-regulating system; auto-gating brightness, performing basic object and edge detection, and turning alternate forms of sense data into visual information. Contemporary scopes, thermal, and night vision devices act as computational devices, flattening the world around them. People become signatures in space. The weapon holder becomes a discriminator. Noel takes these ways of “seeing” off the battlefield and examines their output as aesthetics.

What unites these two bodies of work is a sense of being touched by capital but persevering in the beauty regardless. The dot of the UFO on the sublime image of the sky. The unknowable touching the unknowable. The angelic trace of bodies meshing into a ball of pulsing light in a crowd becomes an angel in the flattening. Even in the pits of techno-capitalism, imperialism, and violence, the world cannot escape its material base and the beauty and immanence that run through it.

David Noel is an artist and educator working across media, whose work examines the downstream effects of the Global War on Terror. Drawing from his experiences as a veteran, he observes how military aesthetics and technologies circulate through everyday life, often through quieter imprints found in cultural debris. Noel was born in Korea, raised in West Virginia, and currently lives in Northern Kentucky, where he teaches at the University of Cincinnati.

Trevor Paglen is an artist whose work spans image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines. He has had solo exhibitions at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington D.C.; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Fondazione Prada, Milan; the Barbican Centre, London; Vienna Secession, Vienna; and Protocinema Istanbul, and participated in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, and numerous other venues.

In March 2026, Paglen was named the winner of the LG Guggenheim Award. Paglen’s sixth book, “How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI”, was recently released by Verso Books.

Paglen holds a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley, an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Geography from U.C. Berkeley.

Research Projects is supported by the generous donations of Jeremiah Currier, Spencer Kerber, and subscribers like you. If you are interested in supporting the project please reach out to: research.projects.forever@gmail.com

This week in NYC, visit the live event: Devin O’Shea and TrueAnon hosts Brace Belden & Liz Franczak at The Bell House on June 25th.

CHAPTER 16: The VP Fair

“This Veiled Prophet Fair’s the biggest farce,” said Big Daddy, correspondent for the local access program World Wide Magazine. Visiting the fair in July 1987, Big Daddy noted that the most popular downtown exhibit was the bathrooms. “A bunch of rich old men get their jollies off, taking money from the city,” he said. “You think this don’t cost you? You’re kidding me. Look at all the police down here walking around doing nothing. I’m telling you, this is costing you big money, and you think it’s big fun. You people that come to the VP Fair; you must be stupid.”

The Veiled Prophet Parade celebration morphed and rebranded in the 1980s. From 1981 to 1995, the VP Fair, “America’s Biggest Birthday Celebration,” became a major summer festival in downtown St. Louis. For a little over a decade, the VP meant a bonanza of red, white, and blue. It’s a coincidence of literature that the devil often appears in archways, and that this summer festival, presided over by our favorite Ku Klux character in the heart of downtown, was held directly under that big silver parabola.

There were beers and brats; patriots and cheerleaders; women in bikinis cooling off in the spray of a fire hydrant turned fountain. Every summer, celebrities like Dolly Parton and the Goo Goo Dolls performed on the riverfront, and the McDonnell Douglas Air Show put on a deafening display of superior military airpower.

As a boy, I was lucky enough to attend. I can still remember the eardrum-splitting noise of a McDonnell Douglas AV-8B Harrier II Jump Jet, which wowed the audience by suspending itself over the waters of the Mississippi River. It was shockingly loud. The sound seemed to erupt from the cement pavement before bouncing off the metal exterior of a leg of the Arch. My sister, younger by a few years, stuck her fingers in her ears, but it was all-encompassing. There was no escape except to retreat down into the Arch’s subterranean museum.

Like future military targets in the Middle East, the festival crowd was meant to be shocked and awed by the 120-decibel power of these weapons. Jets demonstrated their capacity to strafe enemies at supersonic speed, with the crowd gathered under the Arch substituting for the people of Ho Chi Minh City or Stalingrad.

The planes’ godlike speed, their patterned formations, their total control over an ocean of sky above the Mississippi would translate into air superiority over Baghdad in the Gulf War. If US citizens were to appear in the streets, such as in the scenario of a general strike, in the blink of an eye, an F-4 Phantom II could deliver more than 18,000 tons of ordnance, wiping away whole city blocks with scientifically precise missiles, many of which were manufactured just north of downtown, in the military aircraft sector that developed around Lambert’s airport and Scott Air Force Base.

Since their founding, the Klansmen and the Veiled Prophet have both sought to authentically position themselves alongside the red, white, and blue, but in the 1980s, the shift to a downtown VP celebration was also meant to reinvent, and rejuvenate, not only St. Louis but the American soul. The city sought to shake its stagflation malaise and claim the birthday of the United States as its own.

The VP Fair did so with a concentrated display of Reaganite Americana—funnel cake; Budweiser; a water-skiing Uncle Sam; riverboat races between the Delta and Mississippi Queen; a cosplay division of Revolutionary War minutemen sporting tricorn hats and muskets; Tom Sawyer stealing a pie off a windowsill; two hundred men and women with their right hands raised, wearing T-shirts that read “I enlisted at the 1985 VP Fair.”

THE EADS BRIDGE FIASCO

For most of the VP Fair’s history, Black St. Louisans stayed away in droves. Citizens objected to the July heat and showed a lack of interest in the performers as well as a generally cautious attitude toward the Veiled Prophet, who most understood as a nefarious white character if not an explicit Klansman. Criticism remained constant: “We were educating both Blacks and whites in the community about what a dud this VP thing was all along,” Percy Green said.

The VP Fair advertised itself as a summertime event for white people to drive in from the suburbs and spend a day downtown, which was surrounded by economic blight. Television cameras captured the early ’80s crowds, revealing a sea of wall-to-wall white faces in a city that was 45 percent Black. Fear of violence and of the other operated in the background. “In 1982,” Thomas Spencer notes, “two young white men were shot to death when they tried to stop a racially charged fight between groups of black and whites.”

In 1987, this racial inequity was pointed out in a series of articles by Eric Mink of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, who also noticed some statistical incongruities in the VP Fair’s reporting. The group’s communications chairperson, Allyn Glaub, said that 3.75 million people attended the second fair in 1982. That number was much higher than the St. Louis metropolitan area’s entire population, which suggests the equivalent of every single person in the St. Louis region attended the fair on one of the three days of the event. Mink also noted the expensive cost of re-sodding the entire Arch grounds every year after the celebration, and that the fair leadership had accumulated huge salaries while resisting calls to diversify, failing to feature more Black musicians or vendors.

Despite the iron rule of laissez-faire economics, which was stripping St. Louis public schools bare, in 1987, the VP celebration received $650,000 from taxpayer funds, from both St. Louis City and County, in order to stay afloat. Bad weather had wreaked havoc on the organization’s checkbook. “It’s almost like there’s a curse on this thing,” Percy Green said in 1993. “That’s what I like to think.”

As Big Daddy of World Wide Magazine pointed out, taxpayer money became the table stakes for negotiation between the Veiled Prophet leadership and city officials. The VP Fair needed lots of public funding every year, not just in the bad times.

In 1987, the Veiled Prophets pressured the St. Louis police board to close the Eads Bridge to foot traffic during the VP Fair. They described this as a safety precaution to prevent “East Side street gangs” from “coming across the bridge to rob and mug.” It quickly turned into a public relations nightmare. The East St. Louis NAACP filed a complaint on July 4, and the bridge was reopened for the remaining days of the fair. “You can’t say the people from the East are more dangerous than people from St. Louis,” ruled Judge John Nangle.

For a civic organization attempting to rehabilitate its reputation—to prove to the world that “though we have a Klanish-looking mascot, we are not a bunch of racists”—the Eads Bridge fiasco was a huge embarrassment, but in the following days, it was made worse by the historical wound it ripped open. For many St. Louisans, the VP Fair incident was an uncomfortable echo of the East St. Louis “Race Riots” that took place in the summer of 1917.

As noted in chapter 9, the 1917 incident was not so much a riot as a pogrom—the open killing of Black people by their white neighbors, the police, and the National Guard. The only escape route from the violence was into the woods and fields farther east, or over the Mississippi bridges. The Eads and the Municipal “Free” Bridge had provided safe passage for thousands of traumatized refugees.

The event was not discussed much in public or taught in St. Louis schools, so by the 1980s it had been all but buried. In the middle of a red, white, and blue extravaganza, the Veiled Prophet inadvertently resurfaced this generations-old reminder of the way St. Louis leaders have historically treated their fellow citizens. To them, African Americans are a disposable labor force who are not invited to the party.

The local papers continued covering the debacle. Ron Henges, VP Fair chairman, claimed the organization of the most powerful people in the region was actually being bullied. “The Post was very critical of the fair because they felt it was an exercise by the fat cats,” Henges explained in an interview. “They felt there weren’t enough black people involved with the planning of the fair. . . . I think a lot of that was rhetoric on the part of a liberal newspaper.”

The libs were at it again, Ron thought, but instead of ignoring the criticism, the Veiled Prophet Society responded.

Over subsequent years, the fair became less of an educational and cultural celebration and more of a “big bash,” a time of “pure entertainment” and a symbol of summer in a broad sense, more inclusive and popular among all St. Louisans. In the late 1980s, the Veiled Prophet Society expanded its membership by establishing a minority relations committee headed by Steve Roberts Sr., a prominent African American businessman and alderman.

Roberts Sr. was put in charge of courting the Black community, increasing its participation in the fair. “These people [VP leadership] were clearly civic-minded,” said Roberts. “They had the best intentions but didn’t understand, not just black people’s, but other members of the community as well’s feelings—that the city was paying for the fair, but not all groups were welcomed to it.”

Percy Green criticized the minority relations initiative on the grounds that it forced leaders of the Black community to succumb to the white power structure’s rules. For Green, the integration of the Veiled Prophet’s membership was “more of a PR thing to protect the integrity of the VP’s name. Black people wanted to join because it would put them in an environment of powerful people, and they could get some profit out of it.”

1988, a year after the Eads Bridge fiasco, marked the celebration of the eighth annual VP Fair. At 9:07 a.m., on the river out in front of the Arch, the Delta Queen steamwheeler blasted its horn to announce victory in the annual riverboat race from New Orleans to St. Louis. A sizzling heat wave fried fairgoers throughout the day, and the venders rang up record food and beverage sales, sponsored by Veiled Prophet companies like Maull’s Barbeque Sauce and Budweiser. Good Morning America broadcast live from the grounds of that silver gateway, featuring presentations by Barbara Bush and Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush.

Publicly, the Bushes were in attendance to celebrate the naturalization of 175 new citizens. George H. W. “Poppy” Bush, standing alongside Missouri governor John Ashcroft, was photographed holding the two-year-old daughter of a native-born Somalian. Bush had served as director of the CIA in 1976, before Webster, and when Poppy became president in 1989, he announced that William H. Webster’s sober services were no longer required. As head of the agency, Webster had been unable or unwilling to overthrow General Manuel Noriega in Panama. “All of his training as a lawyer and a judge was that you didn’t do illegal things,” wrote Duane R. Clarridge, a senior CIA officer enmeshed in Iran–Contra, in his memoir. Webster “could never accept that this is exactly what the CIA does when it operates abroad. We break the laws of their countries.”

He was photographed reciting the Pledge of Allegiance with Ronald Henges, acting VP Fair general chairman. Poppy’s cousin was crowned Veiled Prophet Queen in 1941—“Barbara Wear One of the Most Beautiful V.P. Queens in History,” read a Globe-Democrat headline. Barbara’s father was James Wear of George Herbert Walker & Company, the “dry goods” store founded in 1900.

The 1988 VP Fair photo-op was a success, but reporters used the opportunity to question the vice president about the fact that US Navy ships in the Persian Gulf had downed an Iranian airliner the day before. It is possible Bush was also visiting St. Louis to check out the airshow, as well as keep an eye on McDonnell Douglas, which never fully recovered from the RICO scandal. St. Louis’s workers were the ones who suffered instead.

In 1993, to save McDonnell Douglas from financial tailspin, President Bush and Missouri Senator Donald Danforth announced that the US would sell seventy-two F-15 Eagle fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, causing an earnings surge of 145 percent. “The President’s decision is a grand slam home run for St. Louis,” Danforth said. A major VP, Senator Danforth was, famously, also one of Clarence Thomas’s greatest defenders against credible accusations of sexual assault during Thomas’s 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

As Henry Berger notes, the Saudi jets were a $5 billion “thank you” to the oil-rich kingdom that had helped in the Gulf War against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. A year later, in 1994, Israel purchased twenty of the same fighters in a $20 billion contract, cementing McDonnell Douglas as a leading player in the national security state despite the layoffs and market drop.

Still, declining trends would continue until the company merged with Boeing Aircraft in 1997. At the time, McDonnell Douglas was in the early stages of developing the A-12 Avenger, a stealth bomber that failed to materialize and led to the company’s sale to Boeing. Later, when Boeing missed out on the contract for the Joint Strike Fighter in 2001, it laid off seven thousand more St. Louis workers.

THAT AIN’T WHAT WE’RE GOING TO BE DOING IN AMERICA

Al Kerth, an ad executive at Fleishman-Hillard and the secretary of Civic Progress, took over the Veiled Prophet Society in the mid-1990s. The “VP” was cut from “VP Fair” and the regular summer bash changed its title to the more democratic-sounding “Fair Saint Louis.” The change was met with the approval of St. Louis’s first Black mayor, Freeman Bosley Jr. “You had some folks who thought the term ‘VP’ and ‘Veiled Prophet’ had exclusive connotations,” said Bosley. “This eliminates any concerns and perceptions about the VP Fair.”

The Veiled Prophet Society denied that the evolution of the fair had anything to do with a diversification in political leadership, and were callously indifferent to objections. “Either you come and have fun or you stay away,” Republican lobbyist Roy Pfautch told the Post-Dispatch.

As opposed to the various moral arguments surrounding the Prophet, money motivated progress. Rusty Hager, the 1995 Fair Saint Louis chairman, described the celebration’s name change as a way to avoid having to explain “VP” to people with cash to burn. “We decided to change the name to Fair St. Louis because it makes it all a lot simpler when we’re outside of St. Louis trying to elicit corporate sponsors.”

Ron Henges disagreed: “That’s all a bunch of bullshit.” Henges thought that the St. Louis Black community resented the name VP without cause, and that the branding shift was strictly the result of “bad feelings.” Henges seemed to channel the spirit of Alonzo in interviews with historian Thomas Spencer, admitting that he believed that a class system is “an inevitable part of American society and that poor people should understand as much and try to improve themselves through their own efforts.” He went on:

Many, many [of ACTION’s] protests had no foundation in fact, it’s just the publicity aspect of it. To try to rip the mask off the VP or to protest the VP ball is to say, “Hey, we don’t like it because they’re a bunch of rich fat cats that are having this big party.”

That’s never going to change. Rich fat cats are always going to have their big parties. If it’s not public, it’s going to be private. That’s their prerogative. Just as the poor working-class people are welcome to have their own party too—to do their own thing.

If you’re protesting because I’m rich and you’re poor then we’ve got a real big problem. Because that ain’t what we’re going to be doing in America.

For men like Henges, the origins of wealth lie in the workings of the free market. They never question how the market produces wealth, nor examine whether it guarantees people’s freedom. That the market is composed of billions of workers laboring day in and day out to facilitate Henges’s life—producing the food he eats, the car he drives, the house he lives in, the office he works in, the clothes he wears, the entertainment he consumes—is never considered. Nor are the numerous examples of Veiled Prophet men gaming the market, illegally and legally bending production and commerce to their will, or growing rich from anti-social commodities like weapons systems, coal, and Agent Orange. For Henges, being wealthy in America is a means to an end—part of gaining membership in the political club that protects its own interests, even to the detriment of the social fabric. As George Carlin said, it’s a big club, and you, and I, ain’t in it.

Get the book: The Veiled Prophet

Alfred Muszynski (1998) is a visual artist based in Montreal, Canada. This is the artist’s first publication. The volume features multimedia paintings created between 2022 - 2025. 68 pages, 8.5×11 in. The first 10 editions are signed by the artist: Multimedia Paintings (2022-2025).

The first edition of Multimedia Paintings is now available on Metalabel.

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Multimedia Paintings, 2026 by Alfred Muszynski. In addition to the book, a selection of original works are also available:

Get the book: Multimedia Paintings (2022-2025)

Explore Alfy’s work further:

Alexandria’s Genesis, a solo show by British-Nigerian artist Dian Joy, examines how digital folklore shapes self-perception and social ideologies, with a particular focus on the role of the gaze in perpetuating myths about the body. Stemming from a widely circulated fanfiction-cum-copypasta entitled “Purple Eyes and Other Interesting Anomalies”, written in 1998 by Cameron Aubernon, the exhibition delves into the internet myth of Alexandria’s Genesis.

This viral lore describes an idealized genetic condition, marked by pale skin, purple eyes, extended lifespan, immunity to disease, and freedom from bodily waste as well as unwanted hair growth. Although rooted in fiction, this myth gained widespread attention online, feeding a niche hysteria amongst those who believed they harbored this rare genetic code, and those who desired to embody its impossible traits.

Despite being debunked by medical journals, Alexandria’s Genesis continues to thrive on platforms like TikTok, where it circulates as both an absurd joke and a reminder of our deeper, more unsettling desires. As such, Alexandria’s Genesis has played a significant role in shaping and normalizing ideologies that continue to support underlying legacies of racial superiority in the vernacular web.

Through an interdisciplinary approach that includes filmmaking, animation, and archival research, Dian Joy traces the roots of this myth, utilizing post-cinematic forms of affect to explore how new media technologies harness the gaze as a disciplinary force to shape both individual selfhood and collective belief systems. By delving into these structures of seeing and being seen, Alexandria’s Genesis challenges us to question how contemporary communication technologies perpetuate desires for unattainable, often dangerous, and always racialized ideals of the body.

This exhibition is a conspiracy. A fanfiction. A myth. A copypasta. A mutated reality that distributes its truth by any means possible. Operating in the dystopian struggle between fact and fiction, disinformation and information, fake and real, Alexandria’s Genesis situates itself between beliefs, insecurities and desires to form a fanfiction of a fanfiction.

To highlight how the lure of Alexandria’s Genesis—a viral fantasy of genetic perfection and eternal beauty—functions, Dian pushes the myth to new extremes, revealing the mundane yet persistent logic of whiteness lurking beneath the surface. Through her material engagement with the myth and its origins, Dian demonstrates how such fantasies, myths, and conspiracies persist and evolve, highlighting their potent ideological and affective charge.

- Nora O Murchú

And that is what, in a sense, is bothering us.

A conversation with Brian Yue and Dian Joy

Brian
So can you tell me more about the name of the show Alexandria’s Genesis?

Dian
Yeah. So the name of the show is Alexandria’s Genesis, which takes its title from a viral fanfiction cum copypasta of the same name. This text posits the idea that there is a sort of genome for a perfect human being with purple eyes, a perfect body, the perfect white skin…the list goes on. And when it came to naming the show, I tossed up a bunch of ideas. So the show actually in its full title, is Alexandria’s Genesis, or purple eyes and other interesting anomalies.

The latter half of the title “Purple Eyes and other interesting anomalies” was the name of the piece of literature that Alexandria’s Genesis was enveloped under when it first appeared online. And there was something very interesting in that for me, this notion of “other interesting anomalies”. Because while this work on the surface looks at Alexandria’s Genesis as a viral phenomenon, more than this, it (for me) became a kind of example par excellence to discuss the idea of media circulation and memetics as they relate to the social world both online and offline. And in that you get “and other anomalies”.

Yeah… I thought for a long time about…About calling it something else or coming up with a title that was maybe…That obfuscates the point a little bit more, but I felt like if I’m going to do a research project about something why try to hide it like that? It kind of just is what it is.

B: So like in a way, it actually talks about this myth that you’re referring to, a mythology that exists on the Internet. And then so…so who was Alexandria, the protagonist within this myth?

D: So within the original source material, this genetic condition had been around since the hieroglyphic days of Egypt, however it only appeared —allegedly—in Europe during the Dark Ages, In a girl called Alexandria Augustine, I believe. As the legend goes, her eyes were grey at birth and began to turn purple after some years. Because of this, her parents took her to see a priest…And the priest was like “be not afraid” or whatever. I know what this is. It’s a genetic condition called Alexandria’s Genesis.

B: How fabulous. Like I guess, I guess it taps into this very deep and long kind of imagined history slash legend slash myth…it’s building on top of this kind of, you know, like our common imagination of like, you know…for the lack of better words…how bad movies steep their plot on something that seems almost believable.

D: Hyper referential, yeah.

B: Exactly, but. But, you can, you can see why…Why this tale became so virulent.

D: Exactly! Richard Dawkins, in his book The Selfish Gene, posited the theory of memetics, suggesting that ideas or images—discrete units of cultural transmission—aren’t just ephemeral. Instead, they act like living agents that mutate over time to propagate themselves, much like genes. Take Alexandria’s Genesis, for instance. It started as a lengthy document posted online by a girl who wanted to write a piece of fan fiction. It then evolved into a shorter text that gained traction on a conspiracy theory forum, where it began to be believed by many. Eventually, it got even shorter and found its way to Tumblr. And the girls (myself included) were like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe this thing exists and I can’t believe I don’t have it!” Its life became more, sort of, “bite-sized”…in a way that allowed it to…keep propagating itself online. And obviously, you know, I’m talking about it as if it’s this sort of living thing.

But people are, in essence, at the back of this phenomenon, which is something you can’t forget. That human element is crucial to its propagation and evolution.

B: That’s amazing. So in actuality, we’re not officially sure if it’s true or false, it could be real.

D: No, no, it’s not true. It’s not real.

B: You know, it seems like this really in-depth journey into a very obscure, but I think, interesting corner of the Internet. One that I think today we don’t really encounter so much as our social media engagement has collapsed into, as you were kind of saying, sound bites, 60 second videos, and you know very glossy posts. It seems like it’s this earlier generation of Internet engagement that I think really informs your practice. Can I say that?

D: Yeah, to a degree, yeah

B: And then that becomes something that you capture within your work then, the way…the way we deal with these spaces. So I wanted to ask you like, I recall you were collating a digital index of videos from the Internet, like can you tell me a bit more about that?

D: Yeah. So I spend a lot of time on my phone, as many people do. And while this project deals with a phenomenon that in some ways is a thing of the past, the cornerstone of this project is using this myth as a departure point to talk about the landscape of the Internet today as well. It becomes the…let’s say the case study to explore the ways in which ideas and modes of behaviour reify themselves online and how they, you know, mutate to propagate themselves into the future. And I was looking at viral content as this sort of disciplinary regime, as something that, something that…creates the conditions for us to, you know, sort of watch and discipline ourselves, in a “Judith Butler performative acts” sense. And I thought that was really interesting. I was talking to a friend recently about the work and mentioned that…Well the reason the main characters in the main film are high schoolers is because adolescence is in many ways the point at which we really start to police ourselves through the gaze of others. And I think, with digital media or content, it’s almost the same instinct as policing ourselves, but the gaze is more reflective—it’s your own gaze looking back at you. What you’re observing is your own echo chamber, a byproduct of a massive recommender system.However, there’s also a constitutive relationship between the subject and that system; you are reflected everywhere, and you look back at yourself.

B: That’s amazing. I really want to pick out a word within, you know, everything you said, the gaze. I think you know, viewing your practice, I see that you spend a lot of time looking and observing things. How does…how does this process of observing and looking at images found on the Internet activate a commentary about, you know, the gaze, our gaze and the gaze of others.

D: Yeah, I think…I think the gaze is a really interesting thing…It’s something that I’ve always kind of returned to. When thinking about the gaze, I am always interested in the power disparity between the watched and the watcher. I noticed…as I began to notice…the kinds of perversities that can be implicit in these things…I mean in general, the media landscape has changed so dramatically over time. At least from the 1920s onwards, we were in a broadcast culture where media was really given to us. And then you know at the sort of turn of the century in 1996 you get the launch of the Internet and we shifted from a broadcast society into a “prosumer society”, right? Where we are not only the consumers of media but also the producers of media and that’s something really interesting from the point of the gaze. Because it’s not no longer a completely single sided dynamic, but something that also necessitates some kind of participation.

B: But I think that’s really amazing because actually, I want to segue on to this idea of like, you know, it’s not just a mediated… like a passive gaze, but instead actually in itself, a relationship. You engage in something more profound. I’m reminded of Stuart Hall’s concept of, like, you know—with media—there’s both an encoding process and the decoding process, and this process is not smooth. Just as much as the producer encodes a meaning into something they disseminate. It is due to the decoder, you know, the viewer, the observers to…to understand and to generate their meaning. So I find that it’s really interesting that you’re activating that, you know, you engage the viewer of your work, and ask them to question their position within it.

D: It’s very funny that you mentioned Hall. He was someone I was reading a lot of when I was doing the research for this work. I always go back to him.And there’s this quote here from a transcript of a lecture he gave at university, which I’m just going to read out because it’s so great :

“We have a notion in the way in which we talk about images that flood us and barrage us with meanings; as if we can stand outside of them and allow them to be there. The fact is that, if we are concerned about the proliferation of images in our culture, it is because they constantly construct us,through our fantasy relationship to the image, in a way which implicates us in the meaning. And that is what is, in a sense, bothering us. We’re not bothered because we are barraged by something which means nothing to us. We are bothered precisely by the fact that we are caught. We do have an investment, in the meaning which is being taken from it.”

B: Wow. I think that’s beautiful.

D: Yeah, yeah. And I think it’s, it’s that notion of fantasy and that notion of desire and implication that is so central to the work. In a previous project, I was researching desire as a subversive instinct, a way to, sort of, bypass recommender systems or really any system of exponential control that tries to sort of codify us and understand our behaviour as part of its routinised method of control. But now I think I’m really interested in the ways in which desire is disciplined, the way in which it is disciplined within the world itself, but also now almost pre-reflexively disciplined online in the ways in which we engage with this sort of, yeah, the barrage of content.

B: That’s amazing. I just wanted to pick up on something. So, I think the body becomes a site of discourse within this… and maybe perhaps your own body? I think ultimately there is a conversation about race and then about representation to be had. So how does your experience as a black female and as a black British female kind of square with all of this very different and othering experience of seeing your body?

D: I think the body…the body is always going to be a site of political discourse, right? Whether we like it or not. And in some weird regard, living in a neoliberal context has made it so that, like, a lot of different bodies are so “radically accepted” until we experience these extreme moments of rupture.

So, for instance, a body, you know, as ******* brutalised by an instance of police brutality, a body subjugated to slow death, a body plagued by genocide or ethnic cleansing. A body that is, for instance, seen as a threat because of the way it exists in public life.

I think part of the great con of Western ideology is that, like…there’s this idea that every-body is celebrated as long as it, you know, fits within this dominant regime of Western affluence and secular harmony. But the minute you, you know, sidestep that conditional, you find that bodies that might otherwise be celebrated for the very traits said same culture would have found abhorrent in the decades before…these bodies, or rather, these people, become the sites for these horrifying failures and really Western hypocrisy itself. And obviously we are talking about extremes here, but these failures can be little failures, small everyday ruptures and quotidian acts of ideological violence. Like the internalised racism within the fantasies of a teenage girl who wants purple eyes, for instance.

*smiles*