Whale Fall
Curated by Most Dismal Swamp

29th March - 28th of April

Swamp Angels: @baojiaxiang  /  Scrabulous Anomaly in the Re-write Department  /  Confraternity of Neoflagellants  /  Department of Decay  /  Lewis Den Hertog  /  Plastique Fantastique  /  Bianca Hlywa  /  AGF HYDRA  /  Marija Bozinovska Jones with MBJ Wetware  /  Natalia Janula  /  Alexandra Koumantaki  /  Peter Lee  /  Christopher Macinnes  /  Piano Princess  /  Hannah Rose Stewart  /  Marta Stražičić  /  Tea Stražičić  /  Theo Triantafyllidis  /  Jennifer Walton.

Whale Fall is the carcass of a fetid dataset by 19 artists working across digital media, installation, performance, fashion, music, film and theory-fiction. At Gossamer Fog, it is remixed and presented as a site-specific film installation automated by Christopher Macinnes, along with new installation featuring Hydra, Hannah Rose Stewart, Department of Decay, and @baojiaxiang.

It is a project by Most Dismal Swamp, an experimental art platform and record label simulating and exploring a contemporary ecology that has come to be defined by the hallucinatory entanglement of multiple logics, systems, temporalities, and realities: a mixed-reality paradigm; a pervasive, horizonless swampscape.

Whale Fall focuses on the diverse bodies emerging from and inhabiting this ‘swampscape’, and how they might pose challenges to orthodox conceptions of personhood, intelligence, corporeality, and life. Do these categories perhaps even harbour assumptions that erase difference and confine the possibility-space of human social, ethical, technological, intellectual, political development? In other words, might an uneven and combined heresy (a revision of the human) possibly emerge from the somatic mutations and social transformations native to the swampscape?

A version of Whale Fall can be watched online at www.mostdismalswamp.com. And a digital release of the music by Jennifer Walton featured in Whale Fall, entitled Winged // Dislocated will also be available via Most Dismal Swamp and across all major streaming platforms.

This exhibition has been made with support from Arts Council England.




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Most Dismal Swamp is a mixed-reality biome, an art platform, a multi-scalar mystic fiction, a forecasting laboratory, a long tail, a transitional ecosystem, a party, a cognitive scaffold, a bad dataset, a curatorial MMORPG, a memeplex aggregator, a planetary weirding studio, and a record label.

It is a model for parsing, navigating, and elaborating a Dank Enlightenment: globally variable synaesthesia across multiple and simultaneous dimensions.

The Whale Fall video element can be viewed on the Most Dismal Swamp website at www.mostdismalswamp.com/whalefall.html