when we think about nature, why do we imagine it as utopian and harmonious?
what are we missing when we erase the brute exchange of life force and the realities of the biotechnological era?
we have to get acquainted with the idea that there is no real harmony in the universe as we have conceived it, in order to find the harmony that is really there.

i’ve rarely liked outdoor shows. The typically sentimental focus on greenery, the idyllic constructions of nature as the pristine opposite of the “manufactured world” rings hollow to the poetry and burden of our present. i’ve been searching for an index of the natural world which is more true, which speaks to ancient and current conditions of life: one which is carnal, adulterated, but still striving to experience beauty and relentlessly full of both life and destruction.

Gothic Pastoral is a project exploring the auras of the new pastoral, the 1000s of miles of apocalyptic sky gracing the overgrown fields and twisted forests which comprise so much of our actual planet: unsorted, nowhere, a new “nature” that exists in contrast to -- and is the production site of the globalized affluence which supports -- the leafy green fantasy. we daydream about the poetry of the unseen, of rusted-out server stacks slowly leaking our secrets and rare earth minerals back into the ground, of petroleum-based animism congealing into the sacred chorus of avatars + dolls + angels, of 5G pylons humming their cryptic prayers into our hearts and into oblivion -- we dream of our surroundings closing in around us like fate and of our corporeal bodies scattered across space, suspended like the lagged glow of extinguished stars and pierced by both known and unknowable histories.

here we join in the endless shambles and ethereal thickets which can only be produced as the feral byproduct of an orderly world, a massive multiplayer network of ritual interventions in the backalleys and wastelands that we call our home.

- halo, 20.03.2021