Dane Sutherland
The recent Punctum Records release, Exploit.zzxjoanw.Gen, maps an emergent community of practice mobilized around the task of implementing a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack from within the distributed centre of vectoral power. Exploit.zzxjoanw.Gen is a USB device (and free download) containing music or ‘sonic- fictions’ by artists including Plastique Fantastique, POLLYFIBRE, Head Gallery, English Heretic, Jillian Mayer, The Confraternity of Neoflagellants and others. As curator of this project, I embrace and exploit managerial subjectivity as a ‘malware interface.’ My role is to ensure the viral propagation of the ideas, concepts and methods generated by the speculative fictions of these artists. Here, the mannerisms, codes and formal properties of music act as an organon of noise.
The methodological model of ‘hyperstition’ (outlined and swarm-authored by the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit and the Hyperstition blog), is an epistemic device that introduces noise into a given system (of thought, of action) by opening a new field of relations within, by infection. It involves the maladaptation and weaponisation of dominant cosmologies by employing speculative fictions. The USB itself contains several audio- objectiles each proposing separate, antagonistic, different futures and worlds. This swarm of fictions represents a singularity of antagonism, an inhuman bastardisation of ‘agonism,’ which as an entity is reminiscent of the R-U-Dead-Yet? attacks which utilize a distributed botnet in order to disrupt the operation of a server. It is implicitly proposed within this project that the ‘curator’ can be identified as a contemporary accelerationist subject (such a subject is also proposed by the alienating properties of musical projects like ‘vapourwave’). The central aim here is to highlight extant accelerationst methods which may be further used.
Biography
Dane Sutherland is a curator, writer and pessimist from Scotland. A skeuomorphic malware interface and co-director of Embassy Gallery.