GROTESKKBASILISKK! MINERAL MIXTAPE

GROTESKKBASILISKK! MINERAL MIXTAPE looks at online subcultures premised on rapid technological acceleration that also harbor a strong imperialist cultural nostalgia. This anomalous combination leads to a peculiar form of antiegalitarian futurism closely allied to the genre tactics of science fiction and horror, as well as the managerial protocols of big tech. Primarily characterized by anxiety related to the imagined decline of the West and its entanglement with the rise of artificial intelligence, these subcultures engage with a distinctive techno-orientalist fantasy. Their entanglement with speculative literary genres is contiguous with the futurist urban projections of East Asia, post-Soviet Central Asia, and the Persian Gulf. Blooming as a shiny rehash of the classic Orientalist imaginary of the “Journey to the East,” these megacities, up until half a century ago, signaled a spiritual transformation of the Western subject. As an aesthetic system, the rise of internet memes epitomize this shift. Commercial capital builds a paranoid universe, relentlessly gluing together disparate extractionist tactics into a singular planetary jelly. Through a pataphysical revival of the collage aesthetic, internet memes are parasitic entities that break apart the continuous superconductivity of smooth capitalism, while feeding off the acceleration implicit in their source materials. Even at a structural level, this form of parasitism replicates the current financial-logistical cycles under which most industrial production has largely been outsourced to the Global South. However, unlike the jaded political promises of the pixelating documentary imagery of the past, the flamboyant degradations in memetic matter offer no definitive political commitment, as it is constantly dependent on its hosts’ sleek density and hideous confidence. The pervasive politics of mockery on the internet, with a kind of hieroglyphic thinking, then becomes also a mockery of politics itself, attuned to the logic of defacement wherein sacredness itself is paradoxically preserved through acts of sacrilege and defilement. Through a corruption of 3D real-estate renderings, Bollywood sounds, martial-arts games, and mythological comics, GROTESKKBASILISKK! MINERAL MIXTAPE looks at various historical instances of the strange complicity between the techno-futurist desire to eliminate politics and its duplicitous tolerance of—and perhaps even obsession with—humorous, low-resolution worlds. In the course of this history appear lost faces, defiled statues, anime chatrooms, demonic cats, and pestilential affect-objects.

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