About

This website gathers together the sprawling and unrefined art practice of multi-pseudonymous artist Cultura Plasmic INC, Kin>%, Hurrian Cult Legacy, and more. She is from Newcastle upon Tyne, UK and creates art that critically engages with surveillance-capitalism and forms social and political critiques of digital technology. Some of her work has subverted surveillance technologies like drones, whereas others have focused on the relationship between the immaterial and material infrastructure of digital networks. Some of her work is interactive (post)media art, sometimes in unusual non-arts spaces like forums, websites, shops and job-listings sites. 

She has a complex relationship with names and pseudonyms – so you would think that writing in the third person would come naturally, which it doesn’t. For a theoretical overview of her multi-alias practice, read her essay in Hypocrite Reader, Against the artist as brand. Maybe in a decade, she will be able to articulate in a more personal way why near-anonymity, masking, disappearance have played such a defining part of her artistic identity.

Core areas of interest include:

  • end-of-the world narratives, the Apocalypse, internet aesthetics
  • her notion of Digital Fatalism, from current algorithmic certainty and the supposed ‘inevitability’ of tech channeled through AI Hype, to the Three Fates in mythology and night-sky gazing
  • privacy and the relationship between transparency and opacity in operations of power
  • blurriness
  • simulation and predictive technologies
  • cultures of speed, the eradication of distance in a networked world and how these relate to social isolation, climate crisis, cross-cultural empathy and connection
  • radical aesthetics of distortion, noise and unpredictability
  • willpower, decision-making, digital mysticism, behavioural patterns
  • geology, caves, glacio-climatology and futurology: ice as preservation and memory storage, as well as ‘delving down as a means of looking forwards; descent as a form of prophecy’ (Macfarlane).
Cultura – from culture. The arts, ideas and social behaviour that arise from a group, as well as the biological conditions suitable for growth
Plasmic – from plasma. The fourth state of matter consisting of many charged particles, or as in blood plasma, a fluid medium that transports cells
Inc. – from incorporation. Because of course we are born to be businesses, to construct our own brand, to sell ourselves.

Kin>%

Kin>% is an artist-researcher focusing on how algorithmic technologies make decisions for and about us. Her work looks at how ideology is produced and circulated via digital means, exposing and critiquing instances of algorithmic injustice and imagining ways to challenge tech monopolies. Her materials are videos and screens, samples and sound, one-way mirrors and sensors, microscopes and specimens, machine learning algorithms, microphone, fabrics and general bric-a-brac. In the last few years, her work has featured in the Wrong Biennale, Peckham Creative Computing Festival, videoclub’s digital residency, Strangelove Time-based Media Festival, Radiophrenia, Kelvingrove Museum, the 10th international conference on digital and interactive art Artech (Portugal), and Friday Island (Luxembourg). She has written for Corridor8, AI & Society Journal, Moving Image Artist Journal, Disability Arts Online, This is Tomorrow, Hypocrite Reader, Garageland, Artlyst, Cultbytes and Institute of Network Cultures.

Bluesky @cell-less.bsky.social

Lila Darkstar

Lila Darkstar navigates the relationship between digital culture and the body, mental and physical health, identity, emotion, and our social interactions through installation, sound and visual art. Working with a multi-disciplinary approach – combining audio, moving image and physical structures – she looks at how our use of and, at times, dependence on digital technology shapes who we are, and how we perceive ourselves and others. Her previous focus has been on selfie culture, pursuits of happiness and perfection, presentations of the self, and digital expression.

Instagram: @LilaDarkstar

Hurrian Cult Legacy

A new project for 2020-21 responding to the rise of island mentality – drawing out cross-cultural connections, the circulation of songs and ideas across borders, and historic migration – fusing hip hop, minimal techno, sampling and contemporary composition. A challenge to Western cultural imperialism and superiority complexes, Hurrian Cult Legacy is about being in-between places, a push back against polarisation and the shut down of dialogue, and embracing the liminal. A recurrent theme is an image of the sea as a connecting fluid, a medium for cultural exchange and the circulation and sharing of knowledge, rather than a border or means of defence. Expect sounds inspired by the climate history of Doggerland, Babylonian algebra, Mesopotamian Cuneiform, conceptual folk remixes and ambiguous tonalities.

Investigative Journalism

Publishing about online surveillance, data breaches and implications of big tech monopolies on agency and autonomy.

Dolly Mix

Old project (2012-2013), music production using sampling, remixing, flute and electronics.