ApocalypseCore Manifesto – Part 1
ap/ex
This is a test. Only a test.
In the same way an experiment is a test.
More is invested in the process rather than the result.
The result, or results, as they occur, will serve to inform other tests.
They will seldom be the final answer.
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Apocalytpic Expressionism (ap/ex) contends with our own humanity and individual apocalypses. It investigates our emotional capacity for loss and life.
Apocalyptic Expressionism is a continuation of unanswered questions.
The viscerality of materials and nature of processes combine feelings of disillusionment, fear, grief, and hope for survival. An aesthetical flavour the market can not tolerate for too long, for it begins to question the power off of which it feeds.
Somewhere along the way it has been decided that the investigations into human suffering, trauma, and the psychology of the human condition under the hands of capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy was a conversation better left for the outskirts. A conversation better left for another day.
That day is here.
We are at the ap/ex.
Apocalytic Expressionism recognizes that these problems and questions never went away. We have reached the edge of the precipice. We can no longer address these issues with hints of transgression and polite implications.
We live in a technological whirlwind where we try to grasp a way to cope with social injustice, datasets, and obsessive narcissism; but we are also living in a time of mass extinction.
The threats facing us today are not only the rise of fascism and war, but of global scale attrition of the human race.
What happens to us psychologically after such cataclysms? Or those moments just before – as the realisation of a possible apocalypse draws near? What do we go through until the realisation happens? What if the apocalypse doesn’t manifest itself in some extreme quick violent stroke of destruction? What if, for the 21st century, it is a slow burn, a steady decline that shows us just enough of our collective mortality? Will there be no one to save us?
The unstoppable terror of economic expansions, political oligarchies run rampant, and the psychological affects become side-effects of how these factors manifest within our communities and in our own individual quotidian functioning – the ever-present, the unavoidable.
Apocalyptic Expressionism is the visual and the tangible threat of the end, in however that manifests, psychologically, spiritually, technologically, or physically. It is the consciousness and fear of loss and a marginalised existence. It is the way we have experienced the fear [of death] and how that fear was first introduced to us and where it went, if it ever left, or how we carry it. It is the melancholy and anxiety of the pre- and post-traumatic and of affective response of what language cannot grasp.
It is the struggle with navigating all this and the acknowledgment of how powerless we all truly feel in the face of it.
Sometimes these states of being take form. They become creatures that hold these states of being for us – as we set aside our fears and emotions in order to go about our days. This becomes an expression of the mind as it clings and tries to processs these traumatic realities which shape how we move through this world – from the moment we enter it.
As we move through different states, one to the next, spiraling and perpetuating the one constant in our human experience – that order will always move to a state of disorder.
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This is an experiment. This is a test.
Because this is the way the world ends…
This is the way the world ends…
Not with a bang…
But with a what the actual fuck have we let them talk us into?