Scraper

Public screening of Scraper (2023) by Most Dismal Swamp

24th October 2023

Scraper is a dank mixed-reality film-biome presented in six parts across 7 mins. Each kaleidoscopic chapter is an interface for a folkless lore of Minimally Viable Knowledge: stories of procedural data extraction, and aggregation as a cultural logic. Together they explore a ‘connectionist mentality’; an implicit ideological code or intellectual spirit emerging across our platform feeds. Scraper's acid-pessimism traces a scorched history of excommunication, encryption, and ecstatic extraction; an ‘entropology’ of memetic redundancy, ecstatic resignation, and model collapse.

Web crawlers or scrapers systematically search, index, and aggregate manifold data from across the internet, creating user-profiles and datasets that contribute to training and implementing machine learning models whose outputs consist of statistical extrapolations that are inherently defined by the terms of this pre-existing indexable training data. These generated artefacts are predefined by what is already searchable or a known category. Scraper explores our own functional and evolutionary internalisation of this process: How much of our gestures, terminologies, concepts, rituals, philosophies, visual and material cultures may be elaborated beyond the capacities of algorithmic recognition? How much of this work is the work of innovative elaboration and how much is the procedure of search and aggregation? Scraper takes a bleak view: the strata of discourse and social interaction in our dismal swamp of ritualised prediction is dredged and re-dredged for moodboards, think pieces and datasets that prompt further dredging of the same depleted slough. In the fast-paced field of Machine Learning and its commercial application, some have already warned of this state as “model collapse”. So what of the cultures and their artefacts that embody this entropic course? Are all the -cores, promptist screeds, and aphorisms that desperately attempt to define the contours of our Multi-User Shared Hallucination nothing more than grist to a degenerative adversarial network?

Much of Scraper was filmed at our virtual production studio Alt_R.

Most Dismal Swamp's Scraper (2023) was commissioned by KW Institute for the Poetics of Encryption program