GROTESKKBASILISKK! MINERAL MIXTAPE

GROTESKKBASILISKK! MINERAL MIXTAPE indexes an anomalous crash site of philosophy where online subcultures, cyberpunk ruins and imperial nostalgia arrange themselves into a prismatic history full of memory errors, discognitions and techno-utopian fantasies. Glinting through this conceptual wreckage is a peculiar anti-egalitarian map of time, closely allied to the genre tactics of science fiction and horror, as well as the managerial protocols of big tech. Scavenging the scene are the more fundamental but incompatible impulses of rationality and civilization, locked in an almost constant state of combat choreography.

The transformation of the space of the internet, from its early countercultural strains to the highly corporatised versions of today, hosts within it some sweeping civilizational narrations: theories on the decline of empires, regressions of historical progress, fears of technology and the clash of cultures. Western civilizational collapse is a prominent fiction of this kind, in the wake of which historical progress is feared to be sliding dangerously off the road. And reconfigured within this flight of history is the imaginary of the East. Big cities of East Asia, Persian Gulf or Central Asia - with their rapid technological developments - begin to stand-in for the expansion of capital without the resistance of human history, namely its paradigms of justice or rights. Beginning from the early days of Japanese otaku culture, all the way to the spread of Chinese industrial exports, techno-futurist projections have at the same time obsessed over the humorous, low-resolution worlds of anime chatrooms, cartoon mascots and meme shitposting. Through a corruption of 3D real-estate renderings, Bollywood sounds, martial-arts games, and mythological comics, GROTESKKBASILISKK! MINERAL MIXTAPE looks at this strange complicity between the drifts of apolitical subjectivity on the internet, the techno-orientalist imaginary that it rides on, and its duplicitous mockery of social institutions, political progress and cultural freedom. In the course of this history appear lost faces, defiled statues, demonic cats, and pestilential affect-objects.

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