A demon is a disruptive force. It’s a supernatural entity that thrives on chaos, destroying the potential of a logically consistent world. In our current political climate, the demon will be interpreted as that which fractures consensus reality. As we develop into increasingly alienated from the actual world, technology accelerates at a rapid pace, while climate change collapses all understanding of our place on this planet. “Community, religion, locality, all these items that previously allowed us to create our collective understanding of reality have less of a likelihood than ever at breaking through,” agrees Harris Rosenblum, whose solo exhibition Inorganic Demons is on show at SARA’S in Recent York. 

The title Inorganic Demons comes from Reza Negarastani’s 2008 book Cyclonopedia, an experimental text about petrocapitalism, where oil is depicted as a sentient being. “He frames Inorganic Demons as these sentient relics of ancient forces, or forces outside of time, which might be in a position to computationally grasp the movement of reality and its inconsistencies as modes of narration,” explains Rosenblum. This subversion of conventional, human-first narratives isn’t too dissimilar from fandoms and other “alienated online spaces”, where magical pondering acts as ways to dismantle conventional ways of seeing the world, breaking away from the usual reality tunnels to forge recent realities. He expands, “Because the alienation intensifies, I think there may be some innate movement inside us to collectively create meaningful narratives that make sense of reality.”

As a member of the web collective Do Not Research, Rosenblum has spent years looking into fringe ideologies. He describes himself as “working on the intersection of NEETs and absolute spirit”, with a body of labor that pays tribute to those online communities. “People push on the terms of service and find themselves in anonymous communities wielding immense amounts of political power. As a substitute of leaving the basement the NEET creates a metaphysics of a recent world through embellishing a fandom wiki,” he explains. On the surface, these web groups, or microcultures, present ideologies that may appear strange, even absurd, but in addition they possess an “accidental magic” that has the flexibility to push these beliefs on a mass scale and alter our collective notion of what’s real.

“From 4chan to Hatsune Miku composers to utterly insane political ideologies, you get this accidental reproduction of spirit that winds up breaking out and fundamentally changing the structure of the remainder of the best way reality understands itself,” Rosenblum says. “It’s not a spell or anything anyone can do on purpose, it’s just the innate structure of reality that it tries to heal and make clear itself and infrequently that happens in ways in which feel miraculous.”

In Inorganic Demons, Rosenblum presents 14 sculptures using a number of source materials, from WWII trench-based artisan weaponry to raw clay harvested from a Wendy’s car parking zone during construction. Plant-based 3D printing resins and material made out of surplus soybean oil that’s attempting to mimic the qualities of hyper-compressed algae are used to supply knock-off wargaming miniatures, a reference to Negarastani’s text, while blown-up World of Warcraft relic swords are made using a mixture of XPS foam, sand, and the melted relic of a cross bought on Etsy. A highlight is a model of vocaloid Hatsune Miku, arguably a modern-day icon for the web age, rendered as an archangel above a resin altar and made out of motherboard standoffs, chrome steel hardware, iridescent privacy film, and a SD card with archive Wowaka remembrance videos to commemorate the late Hatsune creator. 

‘I feel sometimes seeing ourselves as fungus might get us closer to a future now we have a component in’ – Harris Rosenblum

These objects function as post-capitalist relics, signifiers of a consumer society that positions aesthetics because the identity blocks from which we LARP our own realities. But also they are made out of mining earth metals, that are the product of ancient algae blooms which have been compressed over thousands and thousands of years. This offers the artworks a hyperstitional quality, “positing of planetary scale forces which might be beyond [our] comprehension”. Also they are imbued with the spiritual potential of memetic esoteric belief systems: non-natural conceptions of human nature sure to a collective spirit. “Fantasy serves as an untethered imaginative zone where that future will be radically envisioned,” Rosenblum concludes. “The post-anthropocene either can have human life or it won’t, but it’ll definitely have fungus. I feel sometimes seeing ourselves as fungus might get us closer to a future now we have a component in.”

Inorganic Demons is on show at SARA’S in Recent York between April 14 and May 20