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Press Release
A Certain Lack of Coherence
Porto
2013

Inside an evil dream of Facebook people lying on couches being served drugs by guards in pyjamas. Occupy Wetherpoons or the New Orleans Superdome, an arena experience zone with daybeds to die on. Compulsory opium den, cocaine prison. Russian borderzone relational aesthetics gone mad. Infinite way down total communication. All people know all information, group think, group kill. In the service of profit, or mere subsistence? Genuine mindmeld would be evil. Beyond representation, beyond money, beyond work, beyond reality. The working day, caffeine, subsumed thought-work. Ballard in Dalston. Matching thoughts, network telepathy.

I could try to expand on my initial dream, but I lost my press release notes twice and this press release is released three months after the show to explain the show. Meanwhile things fall apart, lost job, lost girlfriend, lost ideas, and lost starting point. And how can I go back into the original idea when I forgot what was so evil about it? There was something, a profound feeling of what a mindmeld might imply, but now I can't remember. It was to do with evil and killing, the oppressive power of the group mind unchecked. We now see the security services exercising power for power's own sake, and you can think about in terms of neo-fascist politics. But it might be something rawer than that - an absolute where emotions are shared. But I can't get back into this frozen internet. Imagine and explore the image of a nightmare you now forgot but just inhabit. An alarm is ringing two levels down. The impossibility of writing about a Facebook mind-money-reality and the post-representative self-representation that implies: that everyone thinks they can know what is bad and also participate. Is there a Marxist code to which only some have access? What is a representation, what is a group? Who is being addressed, is there an audience which would explain this to an audience? Or is it just an audience of us, getting wasted every weekend, in funky passivity and circularity, in a London-wide Burberry private members' self-extermination afternoon euthanasia theme camp therapy Professor paedoworld? Plus by the time I wrote the text the show had happened in Porto and the mindmeld became something positive again.

Facebook drug orgy, wife-swapping, infinite sex, club = brothel = nightclub alternative space = gallery. A Certain Lack of Coherence alternative space is a feeder for and equivalent to its associated local for-profit gallery, but here the artist pays for everything. Portugal can be seen as a stripped down cultural model of deadly poverty, with reduced wages and reduced benefits, orders from Germany yet no visible resistance. And if not here then no resistance anywhere, this is a non-peripheral model of acquiescence and accumulation where property developers banter on chaise longues in a new boutique club. Here ultra low or no wages renew profit and slavery, and working-class sexism is not coincidental, women are the exploited's exploited. This eurosexism liberates new flows of Stasi-prostitution-finance.

Two army intelligence agents in a white Range Rover outside the Ecuadorean Embassy. The Prism system gives them access to non-linear search capability and thereby access to meta- and content data. They require no prior authorization for searches. This cybersurveillance technology sweeps up emails, social media activity and browsing history, collective emotions and archaic resistances like couples walking the dog in Hackney. The ambient technologies of e.g. clubbing experiences are equally archaic, multiplying collective nonmarkets as market. Compulsory opt-in. Tattoos, bars and bar codes. Social agreement, time dilation, a robot body double comes in to take you to your couch. Matrix brain pods serve the servers. No waking up from a horror movie where all is multiplied. A chain of lofts hosting an infinite chain of events 24 hours in Brazil. In here you can support the old. The old that do not get old. Support your friends, get them drugs. Replicator bots traverse the art spaces, searching galleries and nights out: Contemporary Art Daily's ugly face. Monetise the search for drugs at a morning party at my friend's house. Friends are material to be exploited and flipped. You want a collective orgy, but this means spontaneity as someone else's uncredited work. Being the badgirl, being the nasty one, enables you to grasp and sell your mates. To define, to represent or to take legal action: this leveraging is giving in, accepting symbolic defeat. England wants to break me and it will, rotating me around my own fixie-point. To be a rent collector of the social.

Propaganda clampdowns follow leaks. From a Facebook prison to self-aware dissident unfreedom. The other internet exists. A negative, pessimistic, resigned internet to match negative and resigned art. The Police can look into everything you say and do, therefore what you do changes. The social is open, therefore no more social. The prison break inwards.

MERLIN CARPENTER