The Bastard Fields

The Bastard Fields is a degenerative fever-dream emerging from a slumgullion world of model-collapsed realities. It explores and processes the idea of the contemporary neural mediascape as a sublime “hostile architecture”—mutating a possible world of machinic hallucinations and its inhabitants. These hallucinations are, according to the current logic of generative AI, statistically viable representations of a reality permitted by what can be captured, sensed, and discriminated by these systems. And, crucially, how these hallucinations act on us, in a mutual “model collapse”. Exacerbating this phenomenon is the human component of AI boosters and amateur ideologues: what The Bastards Fields playfully calls “an ambient positivism of sloptimised relevance”. Imagining a world where diverse realities and cultural possibilities are collapsed into a midified slop is no longer an act of speculation: it is simply what comes next in the feed. This parched and hostile dreamworld is not a radical speculation. Its murky contours are visible enough to make out a process that exonerates this slop by reducing our expectations: artists and researchers become scrapers, public intellectuals become memelords, subcultures and communities become “warrens of cultivated anomaly” for trend reports recycling situated value and “IYKYK” laurels … The Bastard Fields is a phantasmagoric people’s history of the neural mediascape, told through various characters: a CGI Bog Body, a homemade robot, two “Creative Directors”, a mask worn by a seventeenth-century Scottish outlaw preacher, an intoxicated Rabbit, and a ritually humiliated Brownie. There are also key locations such as Peden's Cove—a place in Scotland where persecuted Covenanters would meet to practice their religion as an illegal “field conventicle”, which represents the idea of trying to find a safe space to flourish in the heart of a hostile environment. But what other scams, neuroses, and inequalities also flourish in such a space?