by The Mycological Twist
Setting up collective online experiences is one of the characteristics of the practice of The Mycological Twist. Reverse Synergy (2021) is a long-game experience in the online multiplayer game ECO. The Mycological Twist offers an alternative view combining art and technology, which questions or slows down gameplay logics such as competition, ‘survival of the fittest’ and possessive individualism, before they bleed out into the lived world. In a sense, this kind of artistic gaming interruption can be seen as a form of online activism, giving the artists and players a field where they can apply a positive practice to oppose a hostile space by bypassing the dominant narratives and establishing the collective thinking as the only sentiment of survival.
Reverse Synergy explores alternative aspects of the dynamics of digital communities and gaming culture, breaking away from dominant linear narratives and forming a participatory experience between physical and digital space where the players (exhibition visitors) are both creators and viewers of history and the evolution of the game. Additionally, Reverse Synergy highlights the processes through which players delve inwards while physically distanced from the performative body, investigating how a player is deeply involved with action mentally, while physically being at rest.
with Emma Waltraud Howes, Justin F. Kennedy, and Dylan Spencer-Davidson
Vorglühen, or `to glow before’, emulates a cyclical club experience: pre-game getting ready, the darkness unfolding from light fragmentation, and the drop-down into offshore ‘mumblecore’. Diving into a 55-minute score on loop, black iridescent–holographic–moon spiders bump the car thug, deep sea-outer space, same below as above. Justin Kennedy, Emma Waltraud Howes, and Marcel Darienzo perform a durational dance, live scored by Dylan Spencer-Davidson in the Waschbar of Uferhallen. The synchronized, and not so synchronized, swimmers invite the public on a transformative journey, through the Basement Ciaga (Basement Balenciaga Base Saga) flood.
This ‘auto-mythologizing’ methodology reclaims the value of a-live experience that disrupts notions of individual authorship, in favor of collaboration that expands towards, with, and for others. The lucid comes from dropping. We exhaust constraints and habits to welcome guests into this generous and generative practice.
Photo: Isabel Parkes
with Emma Waltraud Howes, Justin F. Kennedy, and Ethan Braun
Unfurl the Jukebox Musical: a shareable cypher is a patchwork of dancehall-inflected pop songs. It is set on Twyland, a mythical planet where the currency of vulnerability is apparent, where songs and movement become vehicles for rebirth. The work reclaims the value of a live experience that rejects the notions of individual authorship in favor of collaborations that expand towards, with, and for others.
"Unfurl the Jukebox Musical: a shareable cypher" by Justin F. Kennedy, Emma Waltraud Howes, Ethan Braun, Caterina Veronesi, Marcel Darienzo, and Marta Martino takes visitors to a cold and climatically challenging celestial body. "
Photo: Dorothea Tuch. Part of "Shareholders I" organized by Montag Modus, Radialsystem, Berlin 2021