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.
Most Dismal Swamp is an experimental art platform and record label that simulates and explores a contemporary ecology which has come to be defined by the hallucinatory entanglement of multiple logics, systems, temporalities, and realities: a mixed-reality paradigm; a pervasive, horizonless swampscape.
An essential characteristic that is key to swampscapes is their anomalous constitution ‘in a classificatory order predicated on a hard and fast distinction between land and water, time and space’. Simultaneously solid land and fluid water yet also neither, swampscapes embody a topology of muddy indistinction and taxonomic heresy. This is relevant for understanding a contemporary condition that has supplanted the teleology of modernity and the fragmentation of postmodernity with the entangled simultaneity of multiple, nested logics: a quantum ecology that blurs, combines and superposes fact and fiction, nature and culture, technology and the occult, past and future, authentic and synthetic, work and play, science and mysticism, self and other, dry silicon and wet biology, online and offline, human and nonhuman. While none of these pairings cancel the other out or even legitimise binary thinking, they rather mutate and constitute an explosion of complex new relations, from which novel systems, ‘accidental megastructures’, ‘obscene creatures’, experimental socialities, dark economies, porous virtualities, techno-rituals, hybrid intelligences and unorthodox beliefs are already emerging. These relations (and how they relate) must be parsed in order to navigate the multi-reality biome, the mixed reality paradigm, of swampscapes with any agency.
A further key attribute of swampscapes:is their adverse navigational conditions. The uncertain terrain that swallows the tracks and restricts the progress of those who aim to forge a path through these spaces has long been a subject of aberration in western cultures. But, Most Dismal Swamp explores the disorientation associated with swampscapes’ erasure of ‘established classical concepts of vista, horizon and landscape’ as a modality of reorientation; as a condition for thinking in multiple dimensions. What kind of reasoning, intuition, speculation, navigation, solidarities, altered states of consciousness and communication may emerge? Might some collective project of dank enlightenment be fostered?