The contributions gathered here propose a cast of conceptual figures and tools through which unreality mode might be tactically engaged.

Jiří Siruček’s reading of The Bastard Fields by Most Dismal Swamp frames our current technological environment not as a neutral tool, but as a "Second Nature" defined by hostility and indifference. Drawing on Schelling’s "Dark Nature" and the aesthetics of Black Metal and cosmic pessimism, Siruček argues that we are already living inside a "slopified" void of automated feedback loops and model collapse. Scott Wark, in his discussion of the works of Ed Atkins and Most Dismal Swamp, argues that “vibes” have become the dominant mode of engagement with this incoherence. Rather than retreating into immersive world-building, he proposes a shift toward “vibe engineering”: a tactic that tunes (into) the affective charge of a reality already smashed to bits, treating fragmentation itself as usable artistic material.

In Proto Gallery Systems’ Clueless Agency series of off-site exhibitions, the curator, participant, and viewer alike find themselves caught within reality’s diffraction. Guided by the figure of a detective who becomes consumed by proliferating details and unsound procedures, the project uses Illusion, fabulation, and forgery not as failures but operative strategies, extending across exhibitions and their entangled online traces. Noemi Purkrabková’s essay extends this psychotic detective work by drawing patterns and connections between various occult, scientific, and philosophical references. Rejecting the "arrogance" of philosophical illumination Purkrabková proposes "Vision-in-Black”, a mode of seeing that embraces opacity, darkness, and low intuition.

This descent into the unknown is further charted by Philip Speakman, whose practice explores internet legends and mysteries—such as creepypastas and QAnon—and the ways they bleed from imagination into reality. His project Katabasing itself operates as one such "tale of the anomalous", blurring the line between fiction and fact. In dialogue with Speakman’s work, Luja Šimunović considers the games of belief shaped by digital networks and offers a taxonomy of roles—from Trickster to Dead Account—that co-enact the loops of online mythmaking.

Within the affective currents of the feed, and the prevailing feeling of dread and derangement, we encounter the paintings, memes, and films of Eliška Jahelková (angel kether). As proposed by Sophie Publig & Claire Elise Herzberg, kether’s practice is a ritual of counter-algorithmic cosmic repair. Through aesthetic operations of blur, superimposition, and overexposure, kether’s work radiates an immanent Spinozian theology where the digital network itself becomes a site of divine connection (internet=god=love).

While kether seeks repair through connection, Vladimir Vidmar identifies a ritualized embrace of non-relation in the photographic practice of Jon Derganc. Vidmar argues that a world stripped of any “guarantor of truth” demands a paradoxical religious stance—“a religion without transcendence.” By foregrounding image post-production in Derganc’s work, and tracing the etymology and connotations of the old-fashioned terms for artist (Künstler) back to the "shammer" or trickster, Vidmar proposes that artificializing dimension grants art a special role: art, as a “ritual of the world’s falsification”, becomes the only possible relationship with reality and honest position left.

Finally, Ema Ograjenšek reflects on Živa Božičnik Rebec’s artwork Pleroma—a site-specific installation of four resin blocks, aligned with solar cycles, in Ljubljana’s "Black Widow" building—to propose a way out of the dead-ends of modern aesthetics. Ograjenšek turns to Gabriel Catren’s philosophy, which serves also as the inspiration for Pleroma. She frames Rebec's installation not as a static object, but as a "speculative mediation" between physical actors (resin, the Sun), historical narratives (the "Black Widow" building), and fiction. By operating as a "dreamlike materialism," the work functions as a tool to navigate the "outside," moving aesthetics from a melancholic retreat into a functional, pluralistic engagement with the world.

Taken together, the projects and essays in this volume do not seek to resolve unreality or restore a stable ground beneath it. Instead, they articulate ways of thinking, making, and moving within it, testing how fiction, belief, affect, and material processes might be engaged as sites where reality is not only produced, but fundamentally reconfigured.