Most Dismal Swamp
Swamp Protocol
From 2019 Programme – Home

arebyte Gallery presented Swamp Protocol in 2019, a protean compression of data by 18 artists working across digital media, installation, performance, machine learning, music, film and poetry. At arebyte Gallery, it was remixed and presented as a site-specific film installation including a spatial 8-channel sound work by producer and genre fluid DJ Anni Nöps.

Swamp Protocol is an atmospheric “procession of the damned… a procession of data that science has excluded…”

The film combines scenes shot on location with various artists with other commissioned footage, CGI and neural processing. The result is an ambient and hallucinatory narrative that spreads like a thick fog of dank swamp gas. Multiple logics, systems, and realities are entangled within Swamp Protocol, illustrating the warped mixed-reality paradigm we live in: a pervasive, horizonless swampscape that seems at once ecstatic, dismal and absurd. 

Murky and disorienting landscapes, cursed ASMR, fungal figures, dank rituals, experimental intimacies, virtual conspiracies and weird choreographies are at the heart of Swamp Protocol, offering us new ways to think about how we might navigate the post-digital swampscape we live in. Might these, emergent rituals, tacit procedures and new ways of thinking be the formation of a ‘dank enlightenment’? 

Swamp Protocol’s dark atmosphere is intensified by the haunting soundtrack by producer and genre-fluid DJ Anni Nöps.  

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.