Kid Xanthrax
Digital kid named Kid Xanthrax touches upon controversial topics within the realms of their work, including anti-traditions, illuminati and anthropomorphism. Using a combination of software and poetics, Kid Xanthrax applies their creative skills in order to make art that challenges tradition and ideologies in a world of territorialised cyberspace. Kid Xanthrax uses moving image, digital art and music production to communicate his ideas that are all based on real life. Negotiating their way through the outside world, Kid Xanthrax takes inspiration from physical aspects in order to transform them into something new and digitalised. All in the absence of materialism.
You are a multimedia artist who uses an array of mediums; some being moving image, digital art and music production. What initiated your love for the arts?
Defacement of property. Vandalism. Pseudonymous graffito’s scrawling themselves onto the crumbling relics of tradition, ideology, credo. My praxis is a digital upgrade on this anti-tradition; as cyberspace is territorialised it follows, it must be pissed on, gnarled, distorted.
The name, ‘Kid Xanthrax’ references Xanax – how does this relate to you and your work?
Unlike the ‘enfant terrible’, the ‘enfant venimeux’ is poisonous both to themselves and their progenitors imparting much more destruction. They do not only embarrass. They are disease to tradition before them and to the manufacturers of tradition. The infectious B. Anthracis bacteria seemed aptly horrific, causing Anthrax, often weaponised, etc.
Xanax f**king relaxes me though.
Can you talk us through one of your projects that you feel most in touch with or that reflects you as a person the most?
I rarely, if ever, invest the personal into my work. I’d rather it has nothing to do with me. Or better yet, nothing to do with my mundane experience of humanity. The outside is what I’d like to negotiate. Oh but here’s a mirror selfie.
You often reference the illuminati within the context of your work; for example, during the track ‘Syndrom IX - Seraphic Decorative Catalog/Reptilian Mosque’. What is your personal opinion on the conspiracies surrounding the illuminati and why does it interest you?
#ILLUMINATICORE
Historically the organisation consisted of ‘progressive intellectuals’ (aka Annunaki) and was de-platformed by the Catholic Church. Eventually conservatives and religious fanatics finished the gutting. Yet this contemporary conspiracy of a shadowed reptilian organisation who puppeteer reality is deeply interesting to me. They are afforded so much power and credit in this mythology, like demons channeling chaos magic. The ‘New World Order’ has accumulated into this globalist hellhole and we are all sinking. That’s not too mysterious really. I am deeply skeptical. Yet if we owe the totality of human tragedy to anthropomorphic lizards, at least we can sleep soundly.
Most recently you have been creating work that looks at anthropomorphism - Can you explain what you have created so far in regards to this philological concept?
Anthropomorphism is a form of anthropocentric exceptionalism, humankind being clever enough to mistake ourselves as God. Historically this horrific imposition of human traits onto animal is lucid in artistic representation, but also materially evidenced by vivisection, extinction of species, bestiality etc. More it functions as a mythologising force, not of antiquity, but a thread which runs through our inability to cope with ourselves in all powers and limitations. Fables telling of deities or demons who are part-beast part-human are not much different than the hyper-fetishized ‘Fursona' or the modern mascot which replaces the lion who disembowels a prisoner in the coliseum. Internet subcultures tend to subconsciously and collectively imitate myth-making systems while simultaneously killing them, often horrifically, in the background of an upgraded yet barbaric humankind.
To answer your question more directly. My work has been examining these horrors through a variety of visual experiments: digital vivisection per shopping imagery, internet anthropology, speculative creation and decipherment of xeno-hieroglyphics, fan-art (contemporary folklore), and sculpture both traditional and virtual.
What software’s and techniques do you use to create work?
The process is highly dependent on the paradigm of the project, always mutating. Software combined with poetics.
You work entirely using digital methods; but how do you see the future unfolding in terms of digital vs physical? Evidently this is something that has been a heavily talked about topic of conversation since the coronavirus outbreak.
Materiality will always be fetishised. I f**king hate zoom personally. I miss raving. Nothing will ever replace sweaty strangers suffocating in a dark smoky room together. Except maybe billions of strangers suffocating on a message board launching insults at each other. I’m too poor for a studio, storage space etc. I have very little interest in producing ‘luxury items’ just to have them collect dust on the trophy shelves of financial criminals. I am just as narcissistic as everyone else though, and I’m sure people will find a way to make luxury digital work soon, it’s already happening. If any collectors are reading this, I have a JPEG dump of alien porn sitting on my desktop and it has your name on it.
courtesy KID XANTHRAX
interview GABY MAWSON
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