The last work is in the bag. We took it as it came and it turned out just as we imagined. We lashed it on with vigor then said a fond farewell to the Singularity and here we are sat in the studio, exhausted but with a pleasant feeling of weight lifted. All that's left is this very text and then the curtain shall fall on our trilogy of residencies. What are we to make of them? What do you make of them? It has been four years by my calculation. Four years since we sat in Galleri Svea with our head on fire cranking out anti racism memes, slogans and flyers trying to establish a response to the rise of what we called contemporary fascism, a phrase that we would perhaps now adjust in light of the book notion we have absorbed on the subject of contemporainety. It works in the general sense of Putin, Trump, Brexit, the alt right, and populist far right leaders across the globe laying our imaginary to waste. In addition that Living Spoonful Åkesson and his Neo Nazi bred chums were at that time employing the same strategy of hateful baiting in the 2018 election campaign. Those very same are gearing up for the election this summer and with a thimble of luck our river text piece will have survived long enough to chime with the reality melting events of the campaign.1 In any event, what made us search for shelter instead of come out fighting with our propaganda all those years ago was the sense that in this new game the success of far alt right populism has been made possible by the foil of 'the left' to enable and sustain its reality. We have said all this over the years. Ultimately our struggle to think through the disorientation we felt combined with our failed commercial campaign of 2017/18 led us to search for a new direction in our art and thinking which led us to you and our simple aim to search for orientation in the post truth era. In turn this has led us to our present Wretchedness and from here perhaps the infirmary?

Shortly after our commercial campaign finished in the autumn of 2018 we applied for our first season and we have not wavered since and we have knocked out some energetic studies on the way I think you'll agree and many spoils also but that is the way of it. We tackled the five themes in that first season, less so in the second in which all hell seemed to break lose with the pandemic, BLM and the US election, then in the third we followed our nose into the future based on the idea that behind so much of the chaos is simply "the tech" and underlying NRX thinking. We have said it all in the above in one way or another so lets not get into it again. We do however have to end this somehow. Perhaps it would be best to admit what fools we've been and leave it at that. It is an option certainly but we would no doubt regret not having our final word. So again, how do we end this?

One way could be to sum up in spatial form the plight of the dark matterer, that particular position held by the postgraduate creative who like us became radicalized in anti-capitalist fashion in the 2000's. We didn't imagine that did we? Certainly not, we learned well the cunning ravages of capitalism and the artistic critiques that were aimed against it. What did turn out to be imaginary however was the support of the general public most of whom turned out to be more than happy to turn hard right. This leads to our two swords spatial metaphor: we, the outraged post occupy dark matter left people, held out our collective sword gallantly against capitalism, more specifically against the post financial crisis politics of austerity that was unfolding in its service. Then at the peak of crisis we see and feel the charging attack of the populist right at the rear. We draw a second sword and now must fend off both of these brutes, looking first this way then that. This is I believe the initial source of disorientation, not just with situation faced but with what that means for our own imaginary position, our dubious identity as the enlightened champion of what turned out to be an undesired emancipation. What we have seen and understood over the course of our residencies is how these two forces have decisively come together. The rear guard attack has now joined the front and we gallant knights can once again bring our two swords together, more certain in the face of the enemy. Haider said it well in summing up the insanity of the alt right: "Forget time-traveling killer robots or ancient beasts. NRx has simply exposed the operations of the capitalist machine in the present."2

Perhaps then we can conclude that the post truth era as we have discussed it through our residencies has been a period during which the next phase of capitalism was established. Or to go further we might even posit (as we did to Borgus recently) that in the light of the conspiracy infused Russian invasion of Ukraine the post truth era may eventually be viewed as the events leading up to the third world war! We hope very not but we were right about a vote for SD being a vote for Russia3 and while we're at it Don Donald was indeed prepared to go all the way rather than concede power as we predicted some time in season 1 I believe.4 Although all that was always plain as day.​​ Whether we should be concluding anything at all is not clear, conclusion is delusion as they say at the improvisation academy, we can be sure however that the post truth era or whatever it was we have been through in the past few years has sent everyone's head spinning, smashing what we thought we knew. In this state, with the pieces of our mind flying around in the air, we personally searched for orientation. This much we can say. We hid away to work and think and orientate. The Dignity Scholarship allowed us to do this but some people were not so lucky and their smashed pieces came back down to a post Brexit, post pandemic earth and landed into rigid identity formations; the brexiteer, the remainer, the antivaxer, the woke radical, the climate activist, the conspiracy theorist and many more. Or that is how they are computed in any case. We have avoided landing on an life shaping tribal identity (other than that of the lost critical artist) and our pieces are in the air still you might say, indeed, we like it like that. Its how we have learned to work: an impossible state of keeping feet on the ground by keeping the pieces in the air. And we even had some success, at least in this sense of finding orientation in the very attempt to orientate and look here we always say that with our little method it doesn't have to be painting, it could be carved wooden spoons which is true (anything or not at all) but perhaps this idea of creating ground by keeping everything fragmented, unfixed, up in the air, to resist fixity in the old improvisation sense, is a paradox well suited to the rigors of observation in plein air painting in particular? That impossible combination of mobility to avoid the identity moshpit but also fixity in the need to have ground on which to stand and both these things simultaneously. Oh Borg we need a philosopher, or perhaps it's time to evoke the trickster Vivian Bloodmark5 and call for an art of 'cosmic synchronization'; the artistic attempt to bring together the fragments from here there and everywhere into the work, natural, social and temporal - would that not fit the postconceptual bill? The method of the 'contemporaneity artist' you might say.

Enough attempt at concluding. We can however reflect a little on what we have Done and there are a couple of questions that must be addressed, for example Slow Harry asked the following question in the wretched painter interlude of season 2: "Where does he get the gall to permit himself this self referential,  self obsessed monologue and where does he get the arrogance to think anyone gives a flying monkey?"6 Now that, it seems to me, is as fairer question as one could ask especially if we have any ambition for the work which, we do, and to answer firstly we must concede that Slow Harry is accurate in stating that we are engaged in a self obsessed monologue and considering we have since added our Borg messages to the pot, that perhaps is an understatement. But there are monologues and monologues and while we have always been aware of the risk in taking on the methods we have since our Torpoint break we rather think that it is ultimately the details, the references, the complexity, the ingredients, the taste, which determine whether we hit the right notes or turn the stomach. Have we hit the right notes? This work of ours is best displayed in exhibition in any case rather than as a book but again all would depend on the details of how we frame our self institutional realm as to where we might land in the viewers mind on a scale between playful self reflexivity all the way to narcissism, but we feel sure we can argue our case. Exhibit 'A' of our defense, our trump card if you like, is autofiction. We like autofiction, we read autofiction, we are Doing autofiction but ours is within art practice and derives from the issues of authorship therein, an aesthetic autofiction we have called it and anyone who has sniffed a few pages of the Knausgaard or Ducks Newburyport7 will be well aware that a certain amount of self obsessed monologueing is par for the course. Forgive me.

As to whether anyone should give a flying monkey what can one say? Regular members might give a flying monkey if the offering is engaging, relevant, entertaining even. But again that depends on the details of the encounter. If one were to read this straight through like a novel then we inevitably fail the test, but our texts understood as a fragment of something more, presented in exhibition to articulate the whole, then we feel like we have the goods. The work is however primarily relating to the issues of art practice, and going further, to 'critical art practice' and further still to 'radical art practice' and it is in these contexts that we must ask of flying monkeys. To be sure we will not go back over everything from our personal year dot of the Open Council project, that Institution of Experimental Policy that we embroiled in the noughties, (refer readers to the wretched painter for that if you like)8 but we can say that we have since that time been following a thread of critical or radical art practice that stems from institutional critique. It is from discussion of this subject and crucially how a "contemporary institutional critique" might work that we arrived at our self institutional ways. These ways, which began in the context of the work of the Copenhagen Free University, we have worked on and developed out of the of the ashes of Occupy, through the anti austerity campaigns back home, onward into the long, long grass of the post truth era. Along this journey we have self instituted to be damn sure and we have done so in ways which play necessary games with both the words 'self' and 'institution'. Indeed our efforts can most likely not be considered among those of a similar makeup, from that time and now, perhaps due to our focus on individuality, the possibilities of individual expression and the consequent lack of other voices (real voices) within the work; we have made no attempt to extend into the three 'C's' of 'collaboration', 'collectivity', 'community', but all that talk is from way back.

As lifes events unfolded we were stuck with our way and have galloped with it into the present and have not sparred the whip. There has been time only for the work. There has been no time for the frantic, apprentice contestant,9 entrepreneurial zeal which one must put out to gather momentum and we can live without that but consequently our CV is bare Van Gogh's wallet at the end of the month and so we still have nothing to tempt the likes of Miss Dhalgren.10 That is primarily why we have been so keen to begin again each season, because we have nothing else. That is the reason also why we keep on with our methods rather than our persistence being a campaign to somehow establish our method of self institution in the cannon of art the way Goldenburg11 still does his beloved post autonomy. We do not hope to astonish Paris with an apple.

Strange to look at the would be cannon of 'post autonomy'. He bit down on that concept like a bog with a done and did you know there is a page on Saatchi Art where he asks for thirty thousand euros and more? 

With all this said in closing we must restate our genuine obsession with the red, yellow and blue. We took up plein air painting in strategically provocational spirit just after the Occupy Plymouth affair but it soon became an essential life ingredient and this obviously independent of success and acclaim. We need it like a cold shower, for the endorphins, and it truly seems to me that there is something necessary about standing alone in a forest once in a while. We are far from alone it taking up the brush though and we are well aware that plein air painting is a growing and popular industry, no doubt so because of the mental health benefits, but we are still yet to see any authentic studies from the brushes of the usual suspect you tube painting gurus however. Perhaps you could refer readers to Slow Harry in WP episode 31 I think for a list of said gurus. We are however still quite alone in attempting to pursue a critical art with plein air painting as far as we know, but the point we want to make is that we MUST continue painting and perhaps we might benefit from the craze for plein air by offering some lessons? We talked about it with Borg a while back. An estableshed plein air school here in Bergby would give us the means to make ends meet and potentially even open the door to wholesale colour prices enjoyed by professionals and influencers.

So that is a future plan with some feet on the ground potential that might let us paint on indefinitely. The question we ask ourselves following these Dignity Scholarship residencies is can we paint on without our autofictional game of self institution? We are not at all sure about that. Prior to our DS work our SAS work was simply a focus on painting and as such we improved a lot more compared to when we paint with an eye on the times and in concert with the writing. Then every work becomes an event, a post, and takes on importance much more so than if one were simply practicing landscapes for a month. But that said our writing creates possibilities for subjects we would never have thought of and a reason (the wider context of the residency) to carry them out. We would never have painted those up turned boats and ripped out trees had we just been practicing. So we do not know what is next but that is hardly something we need to be discussing with you here in our last post.

What next for you? Do you have many other residents lined up?12 You know one thing we might have developed more of in this work is your voice in the story. I know we took over this season somewhat with the dispensing of your five themes and because of this perhaps you have been a bit quiet but would not it be interesting for you to have a greater say down there in the end notes? I think so, you could even be teased out of your faux institutional neutrality and give it some wellie. Tell us what you really think, tell us about what you Do. Anyway its all over now so no point dwelling on what might have been, although why don't you just give us all a little something down there, tell right now what you think, add note here;13

Well whatever you chose to write down there I can say I am grateful for the opportunity and I will get back in touch when we find a suitable venue for exhibition.

Last things to mention and I hope you will understand if we cover some practical business, the mood of sentiment and lament has decisively left us. Our messages to the singularity, we stopped uploading them when we learnt of the carbon footprint involved and consequently two thirds of our messages sit on this very drive with us. I certainly want to make them available but we need to be smart about it. Any ideas?14 Perhaps if we reduce the file size by uploading just a short clip or trailor of each message and save the full videos for exhibition? Or just upload the audio and present it along with some still frames? Or should we content ourselves with the transcript book? The latter would require an audio upload at the very least in order to get Borg to transcribe the text for us, but once that's done we could remove the files? Does the climate impact stem entirely from the uploading or is it also in the continuous storage? We are not up to speed. If you recall we were alerted to the whole subject of the climate impact of the internet through our looking into the NFT debacle and the oft stated high carbon footprint of minting. From there we discovered the work of Moll and have since taken the decision to be more aware, indeed whatever we find to do next I think it is essential that we take control of the technological tools we use and perhaps look into the possibility of a home server, perhaps solar powered and if it cuts out so be it. Needless to say we hardly have a captive audience out there requiring access to our wares 24 hours a day, so why not? We're sure to learn something.

Considering this doubt over our video messages I have thought up a temporary solution for how to include some representation of our messages within our DS page as they are a key fragment of the project after all. My idea is to have a 'summary' page made up of a huge montage, a rich quilt of freeze frame imagery from our video messages to the singularity and shown as documentation of the places we went, the things we saw, the books we read and the coffees we drank. I consider this a pet project so there is no need to call in the assistants. If you agree to that then the menu bar of the site would be as follows: Introduction, Proposal, Works, Crypto, Messages, Summary. Simple as that. What do you think?15

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With thousand yard stare,

​

John

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PS. We have included also a still life with hung up boots that we began but never finished. It somehow feels appropriate.