Autotelic Foundation to present a solo exhibition by Most Dismal Swamp, curated by Nadim Samman. The exhibition includes the UK premiere of their newest film, The Bastard Fields, accompanied by an
installation that expands its imaginative universe.
The Bastard Fields is a bold new work of outsider cinema, combining real-world locations and unreality
engines. Directed by Most Dismal Swamp and co-commissioned by Autotelic Foundation the film blends
folk-horror, futurism and experimental video art to hallucinatory effect. Set in a nightmarish terrain defined by ‘model collapse’ (in which toxic AI systems, trained on biased data, have completely flooded the zone), a cast of strange characters variously seek resistance or accommodation with “midification”.
Visceral and nightmarish, The Bastard Fields plays like a cursed transmission beamed in from the graveyard slot of a collapsing timeline. Its textures are sticky, and its edits erratic, with characters flickering between uncanny archetypes and corrupted memes. The film embraces a late-night horror ethos—where the boundaries of taste, genre, and coherence blur. Bodies leak, language stutters, and meaning oozes through porous interfaces.
In the bleak universe of The Bastard Fields, online enclaves (once thought to be safe havens) are recast as engineered “warrens of cultivated anomaly.” Throughout these quasi-underground spaces, a neo-medieval network of creative directors, reality-hustlers, and content producers are at work, extracting all value– transforming meaning into sludge. Key settings like the historical Peden’s Cove—a secret haven for religious dissenters in 17th-century Scotland—echo with symbolic weight in this dark vision of life (and undeath) overrun by algorithms and scam culture. An intense soundtrack runs throughout.
Beyond the screen, The Bastard Fields extends into an installation at The Bacon Factory, comprising a
constellation of key props and more. The Bastard Fields is a decaying fever-loop, oozing out of collapsed reality templates. The film navigates a haunted sensorium—where machinic visions sediment into a glimmering architecture of ambient control.
The cast drifts through the wreckage of collapsed consensus: An embittered bog body plots exit strategies with a scrapheap robot; two creative directors peddle reality presets across a cracked Splinternet; a mystic rabbit livestreams epistemological sinkholes; an outlaw preacher cultivates his field conventicle; and poor little Brownie gets martyred in the churn ?. This is content’s final convulsion—the clamour and shame of expression at the end of the world. – Most Dismal Swamp
Most Dismal Swamp, The Bastard Fields 3rd Oct – 14th Dec 2025 The Bacon Factory
Vernissage: 3rd Oct 6PM-9PM Hours: Thurs – Sun 12PM-6PM, All Images Still from The Bastard Fields © Most Dismal Swamp
About
Most Dismal Swamp is a project by curator, artist, and researcher Dane Sutherland (b. 1985, Scotland). MDS operates through multimedia commissions and speculative collaborations with a wide network of artists. Its work spans video, installation, and online hallucinations dredged from the slumgullion world of digital, platform, and neural media. Most Dismal Swamp’s work has been presented at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2024); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2024); /slash arts, San Francisco (2022); Hellerau, Dresden (2022); MIRA Festival of Digital Arts, Barcelona (2021); Gossamer Fog, London (2019); and Arebyte, London (2019). Dane Sutherland lives and works in London.
Autotelic Foundation champions creation and debate at the nexus of art and technology. We support ambitious work by established and emerging voices, through new commissions, institutional partnerships, publishing, and education. This is our first exhibition at the Bacon Factory since our launch in Spring 2025. Other projects in 2025 include the Vienna Digital Cultures festival (viennadigitalcultures.at) and Alva Noto’s new concert spectacular at Berlin’s legendary nightclub, Berghain. Autotelic Foundation is directed by Nadim Samman. autotelic-foundation.org
