Most Dismal Swamp
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).