Orphan Drift
[UK]
0rphan Drift (0D) is a collaborative artist and hive mind formed in London in 1994 by Maggie Roberts aka Mer, Suzanne Karakashian, Ranu Mukherjee, and Erle Stenberg.
As an artistic entity, 0rphan Drift is known for immersive and visually complex works that use the sample and the remix extensively, treating information as matter and the image as a unit of contagion. Science fictional and immersive, the work complicates the distinctions between material and immaterial phenomena and dimensions, both in content and media.
Much of their work explores speculative futures, mimetic patterns of desire, production and consumption – particularly in relation to the rapid technological changes happening at the time – and draws heavily on cyberpunk fiction, polyrhythmic electronica, and the underpinnings of African religious systems. They have produced video and AV performance, collage, text, and print works, with extensive contributions in the social arenas around contemporary art, underground music, cyber-feminism, and post-structuralism.
Their seminal sci-fi theory book, 0(rphan)<d(rift) Cyberpositive (1995), was re-issued in 2012. Both then and now, its collage of theory and fiction set the challenge to “Let go of your nostalgia. Let go of being human”. The influence of rave and digital music technologies are affirmed as the dancefloor repeatedly appears as a philosophical arena. 0D was a source of inspiration for CCRU, sharing similar fascinations, collaborating together, and artistically activating many key theoretical concepts. OD collaborated with Nick Land on his '95 and '96 Virtual Futures performances, Meltdown and Katasonics, before developing the complex, month-long Syzygy event with CCRU, which provided a platform for the intense evolution and amplification of both groups' fictional frequencies. In 2007 0D co-published Liquid Lattice with CCRU in the Frozen Tears 3 collection.