Omsk Social ClubThe Wet Altar, 2021
01 May 2021
A tale with no end
The Wet Altar (2021) is a tale with no end. The interactive, digital work commissioned by LAS utilizes Omsk Social Club’s ideas of parallel worlds, their signature style of Real Game Play and the fierce practice of participation as perception. The webbed narrative sits at the crossroads of sci-fi, technology, magick, and current politics. It is reminiscent of choose-your-own-adventure stories, however, the work oversteps the boundaries between fiction and reality. The words echo into the reader’s everyday life through embedded commands. Channeling the worlds of artist Leonora Carrington, philosopher Simone Weil, and author Nnedi Okorafor, The Wet Alter questions the effect of narrative on our subconscious.
The interactive, digital work commissioned by LAS utilizes Omsk Social Club's ideas of parallel worlds, their signature of Real Game Play and the fierce practice of participation as perception.
The title of the artwork is based on the term 'Wetware' - which refers to the connection between the central nervous system and the human mind. 'Wetware' is often used when speaking about the unconscious in the ancient Tibetan Book of the Dead. In later years the genre of science fiction used the term to describe the concept of software and hardware that undergoes a biochemical process, linking the human brain to other artificial systems and vice versa. The Wet Altar is constructed as a stage for the unconscious to explore its own imaginative modus, complete with trap doors, loopholes and encrypted escape rooms. Each user will most likely have a completely unique experience that can last from 1 minute to 5 days. The Wet Altar is not just a fictional work, it is a potentially lived reality that can be explored in real-time and space by the user.
Omsk Social Club
Omsk Social Club is a collective whose artistic practice is created between two lived worlds, one of life as we know it and the other of role play. These worlds bleed into one, creating a chasm of enquiry that takes the form of a specific immersive methodology they coined in 2017, called Real Game Play: collective immersion and speculative worlding. From these live iterations, media relics such as films, scripts and large-scale installations are harvested, invoking gateways of fiction or a yet unlived reality. In the past, Omsk Social Club’s Real Game Play immersive environments have explored topics such as memetic visual architectures, cryptoraves, desire&sacrifice, asemic hyper tools, micro-gridded affinity groups, DAOs and consensus rituals.
They have exhibited across Europe in various institutions such as Gropius Bau, Berlin; La Casa Encendida, Madrid; HeK (Haus der elektronischen Künste), Basel; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin and CCCB: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. They have been included in CTM Festival (2021), 34th Ljubljana Biennial (2021) and co-curated the 7th Athens Biennale with Larry Ossei-Mensah in 2021.
Credits
Omsk Social Club, The Wet Altar, 2021.
Commissioned by Light Art Space (LAS).
