We Won’t Recover from This

According to Schelling, Nature is dark—a chaotic indeterminate force that overrides human codes, meanings, and projections, dwelling instead in contradiction and derangement. He writes: “Without contradiction there would be no life, no movement, no progress; only a deadly slumber of all forces.”[2] At the same time, its ambivalent and all-encompassing intensity poisons us: “Contradiction is in fact the venom of all life, and all vital motion is nothing but the attempt to overcome this poisoning.”[3] The Nature therefore torments us with its murky emptiness as we desperately attempt to impose some sense upon it, leaving us trapped deeper and deeper in its ambiguity. In his book dedicated to Schelling, Slavoj Žižek aptly captures this paradox when he writes: “The best metaphor for this rotary motion is a trapped animal that desperately strives to disengage itself from a snare: although every spring only tightens the snare, a blind compulsion drives the animal to dash again and again, condemning it to an endless repetition of the same gesture.”[4] Sounds familiar?

What Schelling—writing against the dominant intellectual currents of the early 19^th century—discerned in Nature may now strike us as almost tender, living in the world structured by ubiquitous neural media. For him, the inherent negativity of the world still bore a trace of the divine, offering glimpses of light in the dark. For those of us living in the 21^st century, by contrast, the all-encompassing technological environments—sometimes described as second nature[5]—are saturated with a hostile void, where automated digital media proliferate, deepening disparities, discrimination, and divisions, and amplifying destructive forms of subjectivization and distorted (self-)awareness.[6] This leads Jonathan Crary to observe that “the internet complex is the implacable engine of addiction, loneliness, false hopes, cruelty, psychosis, indebtedness, squandered life, the corrosion of memory, and social disintegration”.[7]

The rise of generative AI has hardly helped. As Hito Steyerl points out, its emergence coincides “with an era of widespread multi-crisis—with regular financial breakdowns the default setting, post-pandemic recessions, accelerating climate change and increasing extreme weather events, rising right-wing and neofascist movements globally, and several active military conflicts with high numbers of civilian casualties”.[8] According to her, the rapid deployment of GenAI primarily led to acceleration of entropy, casting us into the decaying political and ecological orders, while sinking us in randomized, ever-changing slops. As the term suggest, slops are literally spilled muds of meaningless data, wastefully secreting malodorous signs and information all over the (spl)internet. Kate Crawford observes that “AI slop isn’t invested in the order of events or even looking like reality. The slop is not the territory: it just smothers it in synthetic goop. It’s flooding the zone with AI shit.”[9]

This is what we are reminded of by Bog Body, a decaying CGI creature from Most Dismal Swamp’s The Bastard Fields trilogy, as it trudges through a rain-soaked, 3D-engine-rendered valley: “Nithing, or something indistinguishable from it, is gleaned from starved dreamings, slumgullion visions among slumgullion predictions.” As noted in the accompanying annotation, the videos carry us through a “degenerative fever-dream […] of model-collapsed realities”,[10] where the hostile architectures of tech-based environments haunt their inhabitants with phantasmagoric machinic visions, merging disparate realities into networked entropy. Digital, natural, DIY, inhuman, and artificial elements all blend together as we collectively hallucinate alongside a homemade gorpcore robot in a Nike jacket; the cute office worker Brownie, subjected to ritual humiliations by two creative directors; a demonic seventeenth-century Scottish preacher wearing a Texas Chainsaw Massacre-like mask, delivering sermons from a plastic-draped basement, accompanied by a harp-playing plush rabbit who is, apparently, high; and the already-mentioned Bog Body, an algorithmic undead wandering through fractured zones of this decaying world, from rendered fields to an actual Covenanters’ cove that once offered a fleeting religious refuge from the hostility of the outer world. Driven by metal, dark electronics, noise, and drone, the videos overstimulate us with their formally eclectic plunge into contemporary digital experience, where everything has collapsed into a meaningless “vibeless” slop, rendering it virtually impossible to distinguish creeping delusion from what is (or once was) real.

Writing about control and the internet almost a decade ago, Sandra Robinson observed the growing fragmentation of digital networks, which now connect an unprecedented number of people, materials, data, devices, infrastructures, systems, or softwares: “The resulting meshwork is an ever-changing hyper-connected swarm, a process and event-driven topology of connections oriented to dynamically occurring self-organization that does not easily translate to the human-computer organizational model.”[11] Crucial to this swarm, Robinson argued, is that humans are not its sole agents but only one of many components in more-than-human, datafied meshworks—where human thinking is the least important factor for functionality. In fact, cognition is far too slow to keep pace with what is happening, left at the mercy of algorithms, their automated predictions, prehensions, and exclusions: forces operating beyond any rationalist urge to grasp “the real” in its complexity. We have not only become a marginal element within big data interactions but are simultaneously dispossessed of access to the sprawling infrastructures of digital media. Its black boxes remain encrypted and remote, distant from any knowledge or understanding.[12] And GenAI only fuels this fire, feeding on data so vast it slips entirely beyond our grasp. At the same time, “AI systems degenerate when they are fed on too much of their own outputs” notes Crawford, and the data needed to train AI systems is already nearing exhaustion.[13] In other words, “AI will eat itself, then gradually collapse into nonsense and noise”.[14] A process we can already see unfolding.

This is precisely where The Bastard Fields takes us. “Nothing really disappears, it just fails to hold itself together,” says the DIY robot to the Bog Body when it emerges in a cove. The series makes a nihilistic dive through media architectures, where self-consuming data drives everything to fall apart and reassemble in endless loops. The Bastard Fields’ phantasmic environments, populated by unhinged influencers, chimeric pseudo-mythological beings, deranged creative-industry workers, and spaced-out art producers, uncannily evoke fragmented cultural memories of post-digital horror, immersing the viewer in multisensory experiences that feel at once familiar and alien. The videos immerse us in these hallucinatory, ever-updating psychotic fields, brushing against the “scaffolds of bastard projection of reality” dominated by surreally randomized data. If Robinson describes the digital as a swarm, the reality conjured by The Bastard Fields is instead a swamp—one of “slumgullion visions among slumgullion predictions”—where humans, codes, symbols, affects, impulses, and bodies merge into muddy operational nonsense and together sink into the virtualized bog.

Steven Shakespeare, a practicing priest, argues that one way to approach Schelling’s dark Nature is through the intense listening of black metal. “The buzzsaw guitar, the all too audible crudity of the production process: an aural friction, scoured glass of sound,” he writes, can serve as the condition for a revelation of “the always soiled absolute, the always crucified God.”[15] It is in this liminal encounter with the genre’s dark, unrelenting intensity that glimpses of the “horrible” nature of “all life and existence”[16] can be discerned. Similarly, for Eugene Thacker, both black metal and the horror genre evoke nonhuman, cosmic, and unthinkable spheres of reality, the word-without-us, as he calls it. This world-without-us is the very world we inhabit, only without our projections and fables: it lacks any stable ground; it is not structured by laws we can comprehend but is accidental, chaotic, and contradictory. It is a “a nebulous zone that is at once impersonal and horrific”.[17] Horror and black metal are powerful, he argues, because they reveal—if only for a moment—the exact limits of human thought when it confronts realities as vast and uncanny as the world-without-us. They overwhelm our capacities for understanding, performing the ultimate gesture of “cosmic pessimism”.[18] When a bloodthirsty demon looms, a spectral ghost flickers, or minimalist dark tones reverberate, we are confronted with the sense that existence exceeds anything we can think or comprehend. Such encounters bring us closer to the recognition of the inert hostility of the world and the pettiness of human existence. For Thacker, moments like these bring to the fore the nonhuman affects of dread[19]—forces so substantive to our being.

In this way, we can symbolically approach the dark Nature of the real—something Schelling so poignantly foresaw. Yet the second nature we now inhabit is even more sinister than Schelling’s worst nightmare. For him—and ultimately for Thacker—there remained a firm divide between Nature and us. If, for Thacker, the cosmos is remote, digital infrastructures crave interaction; in “degenerative” mediascapes, we get trapped without distance or overview. The slop-driven architecture drowns its tenants in a swamp of nonhuman data, granting no insight, only deeper immersion. It aims to—as one creative director in The Bastard Fields suggests—submerge us into a “poor vibeless world”, overwriting us from within. For those enraptured by accelerated digital capital, the facade may appear joyful or cute,[20] but Most Dismal Swamp exposes the entrails of this reality as far more hostile and disquieting than we can stomach. Thus it is no accident that The Bastard Fields adopts the aesthetics of dread: as we have seen, these are the very modes through which one might apprehend the deranged nature of “misread and damned data” lurking beneath polished desktops and sleek interfaces. By plunging headlong into the digital noise, it performs an imaginative act of inhabitation—not modelling possible futures but exposing the unbearable density of the present from within. The fact that the videos themselves—featured on a website—exist within the very environments they seek to uncover underscores the impossibility of escape: they suggest that to touch upon this reality, one must get dirty, becoming a muddy particle of the datafied swamp.

Through a flickering, horror-saturated synthesis of sludgy realities, fictions, environments, forms, styles, and intense voiceovers and music, the videos unveil the underlying mechanisms of modulative environments and their bastardized neural operationality, bringing us closer to what it feels like to inhabit the “worst of the possible worlds”.[21] Contrary to the classical pessimist position of the 19^th century—which holds that if the world were any worse, it could not sustain itself and would have to fall apart[22]—The Bastard Fields shows that we are already living through the collapse, caught in the midst of a contradictory reality that feeds upon itself while leaking into the undefined, soiled cosmos of online and offline multi-crises. And, as Bog Body once again reminds us, it is very probable that this time, “we won’t recover from this”.