BasiliskFiles Format: Paperback

A techno-fiction novel on the uneasy desire for anti-rationalist ideas on the internet.

Taking off along the grotesque evolutionary curve of the internet, this novel by Mochu brings together Japanese otaku subcultures, Hindu mythology, darknet highways, ultraviolent cyberpunk forums, and renegade university departments to forge a transnational narrative that trips through the incompatible fantasies of rationality and civilization, with wormholes through ancient tales, recent cinema, plain-wrong art histories, and pirated philosophical reflections. 

The novel opens with a case of abduction in India. The operations of a far-right publishing house are interrupted by extraterrestrial influences with political intent. The attack on a science-fiction writer at a beach in Goa seems connected to a bot-propelled puzzle revolving around the defacement of Medieval temple relics elsewhere. A detective specialized in interstellar sociology finds clues that point to a transgalactic anarchist group with ties to online Posadist forums, while Eurasian political theory circulates as noise-objects in Goa’s beachside clubs. Meanwhile, occultist explorers in the sci-fi writer’s story find that the legendary homeland for Hinduism in the Arctic has become infested by “Gradients of Hegelian Unhappiness” by way of an invasive subzero entity buried in deep snow. The detective’s investigations eventually turn metaphysical, settling on impossible solutions spanning the far reaches of outer space.

Reactionary behavior on the internet, having spawned numerous retroactive origin stories for itself, takes on a tentacular presence across diverse political spectrums, time periods, and cultural contexts, giving the impression of a vast and tangled entity with distributed intelligence. Fatally fused by a common hatred for the legacies of the Enlightenment, popular manifestations go by terms like “alt-right” and “neo-reaction,” powered by nerdy forums and blog posts across the web. Stationing conspiracy theory itself as the central form of thinking, acting, and concept-making in the twenty-first century, Bezoar Delinqxenz is a mixtape simulation of these entanglements at the borderlands of fiction, insanity, and political emancipation.

Mochu works with video and text arranged as installations, lectures, and publications. Techno-scientific fictions feature prominently in his practice, often overlapping with instances or figures drawn from art history and philosophy. Recent projects have explored mad geologies, psychedelic subcultures, and Indian Modernist painting.

Marcel Schwierin and Edit Molnár are curators and Co-directors of the Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art in Oldenburg.