Most Dismal Swamp
is a mixed-reality biome; a place and a practice where a dank miasma of fictions, artists, model worlds, adversarial realisms, external hard drives, camera-tracking data, campfires, opaque rituals, game engines, amateur heresies, visual effects plug-ins, and other animals come together. Emerging from the curation, artwork, and research of Dane Sutherland, Most Dismal Swamp’s multimedia projects involve collaboration, commissioning, and convivial speculation with many other artists. These projects are modular and densely populated, presented across various immersive and bespoke installations and online; Multi-User Shared Hallucinations dredged from the slumgullion swamp of adversarial digital, platform, and neural media. A rigorous “acid pessimism” inspirits the work of Most Dismal Swamp: an acerbic yet playful immersion into the composite hallucinatory lifeworlds, gamespaces, and protocols that make up the hostile architecture of our shared platform-mediated crises.