betacorpo.net>>

4/27/03:

...is a consortium of literary, technological, and entrepreneurial interests. Its mission is to utilize the techniques of vanguard aesthetics to research the pathology of novel perversions. A veritable Bauhaus of psychoses, SUPERVERT seeks to invent new kinds of art and literature through the synthesis of abnormal psychology, operant conditioning, sadistic pornography, rationalist philosophy, and modernist aesthetics.

Visited more for its quite perverse flash games like the Shock-o-meter ("a software device for the self-determination of shock-resistance capacity... utiliz[ing] shocking, violent, horrible imagery to... determine your ability to withstand shock") or resources on exophilia ("an abnormal attraction for beings from worlds beyond earth"), Subvert also provides a quite complete source of downloadable Marquis de Sade texts and critical essays on the darker pathologies in certain contemporary artists - Matthew Barney and John Currin among them.

[oh yeah - don't go to Subvert on your employer's web browser, for god's sake]

Browsing through these texts which, although unrelated, remind me so much of the Damien Hirst-esque "shock" art of the early 90s or Barney's fetishistic neo-baroque, I'm more aware of stark differences in the culture of this decade. They're fascinating, and then really boring as well. The very real/ unreal paranoia and TV-shock, which will always by my snapshots for these past few years, make the fantastic and fetishistic seem rather benign, rather illusory, making up for rather banal intentions that don't quite overcome a certain jadedness, and I can't bring myself to feel jaded right now.

posted by jeremy @ 12:19 PM