You’re thirty minutes deep into the queue, flanked longitudinally by a pair of steel guardrails and wedged between the perspiring bodies of your best friend and a balding father of two clad in mid-calf-length basketball shorts, all-white cross trainers and the obligatory sleeveless Tapout t-shirt. Despite the oppressive humidity, Eco World is even more populous than usual thanks to its Bring A Buddy Day promotion that offers half-price tickets to those accompanying members of the neo-futurist theme park’s Ecosystem club. It seems that most of the other park visitors have the same idea that you do: to duck into the line for Neteshingrad, Eco World’s recently-constructed indoor “dark ride”, in hopes of a quick reprieve from the sun’s ultraviolet bombardment.
Though Neteshingrad’s treacherous wait has grown dull, you can’t help but admire the artificial scenery that brings the warehouse-like queue to life. The space is lit like a greenhouse, a milky glow buttering the potemkin remains of a utopian city’s brutalist architecture, the concrete structures adorned with tropical overgrowth. Animatronic tentacles emerge from tangles of vines, wriggling robotically to the rumble of distant coaster tracks tucked away in the next room. A smoke machine concealed by a verdant wig sets a hazy atmosphere while a trio of TV screens broadcast a looped greeting message delivered by a 3D-CG animated, genderless, and nearly featureless humanoid. Its skin is pale blue - it lacks hair and its retinas are colorless.
“My name is tropical interface / welcome to the new world / the world of ecological future / high-technological artificial intelligence had to exterminate humanity to save nature / because nature has higher priority than humanity”
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Eco Futurism Corporation’s second Ecomodern compilation is a future-prehistoric (re-historic might be a better term) answer to Disneyworld’s Epcot: a hyperreal guided tour through the societies and landscapes cooked up by vaporwave/PC Music/post-internet artists over the past two years. Listeners are escorted through the militarized chaos of Airport’s living cinematography, the neon streets of Yung Lean’s Yoshi City and Daniel Lopatin’s nightcore-dystopian metropolis.
Each of the 5 artists on the compilation are ecoterrorist experience architects with a knack for crafting visual imagery in their compositions. Ecomodern Vol. 2 is the most frighteningly real piece of artwork you’ll experience for quite some time.
More about: Eco Futurism Corporation
