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Alienation and Charisma
Omsk Social Club
PYLON is excited to present 'Alienation and Charisma by Omsk Social Club. Their latest work all be screening on our website from December 8 until December 22, 2022 and is part of our ongoing program COLLATERAL EXTINCTION.
Omsk Social Club’s work is created between two lived worlds, one of life as we know it and the other of role play. These worlds bleed into one. That is where Omsk positions their speculative fictions, through these immersive installations they move into a territory they coined in 2017 called Real Game Play (RGP). Their work aims to induce states that could potentially be a fiction or a yet, unlived reality.
Omsk works closely with networks of viewers, everything is unique and unrehearsed. The living installations they create examine virtual egos, popular experiences and political phenomena. Allowing the works to become a dematerialized hybrid of modern-day culture alongside the participant's unique personal experiences. In the past Omsk Social Club’s Real Game Play immersive environments have introduced landscapes and topics such as otherkin, rave culture, survivalism, catfishing, desire&sacrifice, positive trolling, algorithmic strategies and decentralized cryptocurrency.
They have exhibited across Europe in various institutions, galleries, theatres and off-sites such as Martin Gropius Bau, House of Electronic Kunst Basel, HKW, Berlin, Seventeen, London Volksbühne, Berlin, Stroom den Haag, Den Haag the Netherlands and Light Art Space Berlin. They have been included in CTM Festival (2021), 34th Ljubljana Biennial (2021) 6th Athens Biennale (2018), Transmediale Festival (2019), The Influencers (2018) and Impakt Festival (2018). In 2021 they co-curated the 7th Athens Biennale with Larry Ossei-Mensah.
The online screening funded by Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen.
Gefördert durch die Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen. Diese Maßnahme wird mitfinanziert durch Steuermittel auf der Grundlage des vom Sächsischen Landtag beschlossenen Haushaltes.
The short film has been developed in the frame of their two-month residency period for GameChanger. In this period Omsk Social Club explored the soft underbelly of collective order, consensus and legitimacy through a Real Game Play set in a satirical possible near future scenario. Springboarding off the book “Alienation and Charisma: A Study of Contemporary American Communes” by Benjamin Zablocki, they dove into the manner in which alienation and charisma are generative in the emergence of collectivity.
Alienation and Charisma is a cautionary tale, set in a near-future world, where order and chaos are governed by micro.gridded affinity groups, DAOs and consensus rituals that emerged after The Shattering.
This new model of commonage has alluded to well-known progressive tactics, working from the inside and outside, in a pincer movement from above and below, and has framed its fight as one against cultural hegemony. Yet it is unclear whether its use of popular rhetorics actually will lead to a radical redistribution of resources and a new wording.
Each morning, 365 days a year, 2 members of each affinity group drive and infinity symbol across the city they are located in. They cross the symbol's crux at sunrise, during these drives, members of other affinity groups can enter the car on foot or over the car phone to seek council, muse and pass information.
The future has arrived, but is this the future we had hoped for?