“From a Caledonian heart of darkness to a supernova Scotia? The documentary fiction spirals between the role of the catastrophic Darien Scheme in the late 17th century in the founding of the UK, when Scotland failed to colonise part of present-day Panama, and the contemporary disintegration of the union. In a somewhat wild extrapolation of the race to become the Scotland’s first vertical satellite launch station currently playing out between Sutherland Space Port and the Shetland Space Centre, independence is speculatively framed as an exercise of escapology, a jailbreak and exodus to an orbital space habitat, with all the risks and dangers that entails. The loose plot follows a game designer from a fictional games company called ‘Trancestar North‘ who, in attempting to lift the dark spell cast by Darien, models a counter-future by ingesting cosmism, the history of racial capitalism and the demise of Empire into T-Divine, the geopolitics simulator of the game engine. She follows the Brexit algorithm as it runs to its logical conclusion.” (Flatlines)

@ Hyperdub

“Escapology is just one entry point into of the Astro-Darien universe, which had begun to surface in 2021 as a 2 week audiovisual installation on the main dance floor at club space, Corsica Studios in South London and as a multi-channel diffusion on the 50 speaker acousmonium at the invitation of INA-GRM in Paris, the institution founded in 1951 by the musique concrète pioneer Pierre Schaeffer, composer Pierre Henry and the engineer Jacques Poullin.

The artwork for both Escapology and Astro-Darien was produced by Kode9’s long-time collaborators Lawrence Lek (digital world design), and Optigram (typography and gfx).” (Hyperdub)

@ Hyperdub