Part of ProtoZone16: Hallucinogenesis, 13.09.-03.11.2024

HI-Intensity:

Utopiates: The Lucid Fleshware Journey

Workshop, 14.09.2024, 10:30-12:30

Using the embodied tooling of OMSK Social Club’s Real Game Play methodology the workshop will steward lucid landscapes through worlding exchanges, somatic releases and interdependent fictions.

HI- und LO-Intensity:

Scripts Mundi

Installation

“Well let me start at the beginning…

The 1960s saw the genesis limbs of both the psychedelic movement and the birth of computing technology. Timothy Leary, the pioneer of the former and influential advocator of the latter in the 90s declared “the PC is the LSD of the 90s” and so “Utopiates” aimed to unpack the thinking of this by traversing backwards into the analogue technology of LSD in order to uproot new and alternative modes of thinking about technology today.

The group “Utopiates: Freedom Cell” explored and well still does… the profound and pervasive influence that LSD has had on contemporary technological culture.

Its aim was to begin to understand the many ways in which the modern world has found itself on drugs – I don’t mean here street drugs, I mean the psycho-pharmaceutical, enhancement technology, virtual reality etc etc – we are drugged. It is well known when you follow the drug-trail, that psychoactive substances have been integral to the building of new economies, politics, media and of course code.

Drugs are culture, they have also influenced art, poetry, philosophy and therapy — opening up debates on the neurochemistry of a human brain which like its subcultures have never really been drug-free.”

– Utopiates: The Freedom Cell

Scripts Mundi is the remaining documentation of a real game play “Utopiates: The Freedom Cell” which was led by a group of eight practitioners. Their experiments centred around the thematics of understanding acid as a primal technology and the tab as a console for another world.

The work used the material substance of concentrated LSD to open up a collective performance of artificially induced virtual reality – Real Game Play. The users explored the collective mind made neurocosmic through social intelligence, technological extensions and radical holographic imagineering.

OMSK Social Club is a stewarded and sprawling collective whose artistic practice is created between two lived worlds, one of life as we know it and the other of role play. These worlds bleed into one, creating a chasm of enquiry that takes the form of a specific immersive methodology they coined in 2017, called Real Game Play: collective immersion and speculative worlding. From these live iterations, media relics are harvested such as films, scripts and large-scale installations invoking states and gateways that could potentially be a fiction or a yet, unlived reality.

OMSK Social Club works closely with networks of viewers, everything is unique and unrehearsed. The living installations they create examine virtual egos, popular experiences and cautionary tales. Allowing the works to become a dematerialized hybrid of modern-day culture alongside the participant’s unique personal experiences. In the past, OMSK Social Club’s Real Game Play immersive environments have explored landscapes and topics such as memetic visual architectures, cryptoraves, desire&sacrifice, asemic hyper tools, micro-gridded affinity groups, DAOs and consensus rituals.

They have exhibited across Europe in various institutions, galleries, theatres and off-sites such as Martin Gropius Bau, House of Electronic Kunst Basel, HKW, Berlin, MUDAM, Luxemburg, La Casa Encendida, Madrid and Light Art Space Berlin. They have been included in CTM Festival (2021), 34th Ljubljana Biennial (2021) 6th Athens Biennale (2018), Transmediale Festival (2019), The Influencers (2018) and Impakt Festival (2018). In 2021 they co-curated the 7th Athens Biennale with Larry Ossei-Mensah.

The presentation of Scripts Mundi is supported by Berliner Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt