Folkless Lore and Scraper: Dane Sutherland in conversation

Folkless Lore and Scraper: Dane Sutherland in conversation with Jamie Sutcliffe

Most Dismal Swamp is a project emerging from the curatorial, artistic, and research practice of Dane Sutherland (b. 1985, UK). The project’s multimedia work involves collaboration with a wide network of artists and combines performance, sculpture, computer generated imaging, AI processes and writing. These projects are conceived as multi-user shared hallucinations – a term borrowed from online roleplaying games in which a shared set of highly specific rules help construct an immersive fictional world. A rigorous ‘acid pessimism’ animates the work of Most Dismal Swamp: an acerbic yet playful immersion into composite hallucinatory lifeworlds, gamespaces, and protocols – what Sutherland calls the ‘folkless lore’ of modern life – that constitute the hostile architectures of our shared platform-mediated crises.

Dane Sutherland completed his PhD at Edinburgh School of Art. Projects by Most Dismal Swamp have appeared at Autotelic Foundation, London (2025); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2023, online); and Mira Digital Arts Festival, Barcelona (2021).

Jamie Sutcliffe is a writer, curator, and co-director of Strange Attractor Press. He is the editor of the books Documents of Contemporary Art: Magic, published by The Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press (2021), Weeb Theory (2023) published by Banner Repeater, and the author of Let Me Work! an experiment in comics and animation writing forthcoming from Breakdown Press. His essays, reviews, and interviews have been published internationally by Art Monthly, Art Review, e-flux, Frieze, The White Review, Rhizome, The Quietus, and Bricks From The Kiln amongst others. He is Associate Lecturer at Chelsea College of Art, University of the Arts, London.

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