Wednesday, July 8, 2015

189. Agonizing Art

Agonizing Art/Snuff Art/Mortification is an art movement that arose shortly after the Fall, and although its popularity has been dwindling, it dominated the early post-Fall art scene. The Fall casts a large shadow over the psychology of transhumanity, something that can be seen very well in art. Some artists reacted to the Fall by remembering what was lost, lovingly painting romantic Earth landscapes. Others prefer to pull their trauma from themselves and display it, taking advantage of resleeving technologies to bring torture and death into their work. Typically performance pieces, agonizing art seeks to condense the traumas of the Fall into single symbolic acts of mutilation or suicide.

Plot Hook: A recent piece on display in an Extropian plaza consists of a flat (the artist's birth body, supposedly) pierced through the abdomen and suspended in clear plastic. A fork of the artist's ego is inhabiting the morph, and is happy to discuss his piece at length, while the wound has gone septic and he slowly dies. The artist's commentary suggest that he has some special insight into the nature of the exsurgent virus. Firewall tasks the players with discovering this information.

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