The interdisciplinary artwork Sprawled Soilware brings together role play, bot guardians, and the long-standing figure of flânearie as an augmented immersive experience available over your phone. Created under the constraints of the COVID-19 lockdown, the collectives Omsk Social Club and Hollow have worked together to create a live exhibition format that literally opens up on the viewer’s screen over three different narrative scores. The aim of the work is to explore our relationship to liminality, using time as a circular motion and understanding the cosmic stack of human, technology, mineral, and non-beings.
Sprawled Soilware guides the user through surreal bio-technological landscapes, ancestral hybrids and questions on who and what has the authority to make a reality. The work is multi-sensory and participatory, viewable only whilst walking, and through the popular messaging application Telegram. Divided into three alternative viewing walks, the user chooses between a scaling anima mundi character Thermadite Renji (musically scored by Cammack Lindsey) or a gothic cutie Obscura Sol (musically scored by Tamás Marquatent & András Molnár) or a multi-dimensional ancestral ectoplasm Levetia A. Eaf (musically scored by Circular Ruins), with each route offering up an alternative structure of reality.
The video documentation gives an insight of overlapping digital and living corporalities that happened in Görlitzer park during the event. The chatbot can be still accessed under the following link: to enter the work, go to https://soilware.net/, where you will find The Book of Access, with a short introduction and link to a Telegram channel.
Sprawled Soilware by Hollow & Omsk Social Club is produced by Sín Arts, Culture Nonprofit Ltd, and Montag Modus, with the support of the International Coproduction Fund of the Goethe-Institut. Co-produced by Divadlo X10, Katlan Group, Art Quarter Budapest, and the Collegium Hungaricum Berlin.
Sound: Cammack Lindsey www.soundcloud.com/cammack_lindsey
Video: Gergely Ofner www.gergelyofner.com and Alexander Iezzi www.alexanderiezzi.com/
2021, TM chatbot, video
Sprawled Soilware: Windspeed, 2021 was presented at Ecology of Attention #4: stand out of our light.
Hollow is the shared hallucinations of choreographer Viktor Szeri, game designer Tamás Páll and curator Gyula Muskovics. They have been working collectively since 2018, combining choreography, augmented reality, live action role-play, sound, and game mechanics to create immersive environments and cross-reality experiences. In their world prototypes identities and narratives dissolve and bleed into each other, and the dominant systems of consensual reality can be questioned and modified.
Hollow has investigated topics and contexts such as queer cruising, millennial cults, eco-anxiety, nature as a black box, and walking as a psychoactive substance. They are based in Budapest. Their most recent presentations include: Trafó House of Contemporary Arts, dunaPart 5, Placcc Festival and Under500 Festival in Budapest; House of Arts in Brno; MeetFactory, Y Events in Divadlo X10 and Karpuchina Gallery in Prague.
Omsk Social Club forks traditional methods of Live Action Role-Play (LARP) through immersive installations and into Real Game Play (RGP) to induce states that could potentially be either a fiction or an as-yet unlived reality. Omsk works closely with networks of viewers, each time concentrating on the unique and unrehearsed experience. The living installations they create examine virtual egos, popular experiences, and political phenomena. This allows their works to become a dematerialized hybrid of modern-day culture alongside participants’ unique personal experiences. In the past, Omsk Social Club’s Real Game Play immersive environments have introduced landscapes and topics such as otherkin, rave culture, survivalism, catfishing, desire & sacrifice, positive trolling, algorithmic strategies, and decentralized cryptocurrency.
They have exhibited across Europe in various institutions, galleries, theatres, and off-site venues such as Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; House of Electronic Kunst Basel; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich; HKW, Berlin; Volksbühne, Berlin; and Stems Gallery, Brussels. They have also taken part in CTM Festival (2021), the 6th Athens Biennale (2018), Transmediale Festival (2019), The Influencers (2018), and Impakt Festival (2018).
In 2021 they will co-curate the 7th Athens Biennale with Larry Ossei-Mensah.
Website: www.punkisdada.com