Dark Minds
Across 2025 to 2026, Alexia Project's practice focuses on dark minds as an extension of non-sovereign consciousness within the spectral mind context, exploring responsibility, mourning, and shared suffering with the ecological society from a post-human perspective.
Just like a viscous and amorphous substance, humanity has always been intertwined with ecosystem, perpetually caught between control and chaos, presence and absence, safety and discomfort. Drawing on Mark Fisher's analysis of “eeriness,” philosophers like Timothy Morton describe ecological perception as a form of alienation: the spectral unease arising from the loss of control over nature—pollution, extinction, and decay—is a “dark experience” that reveals the blurred boundaries between us and environments.
In Morton's theory, “darkness” refers to the shadows, discomfort, and uncertainty surrounding ecological crises. These deeply penetrate our mental structures, causing anxiety, fear, denial, or self-hypnosis. This recurring psychological process forms a “cycle of eeriness,” triggering sustained mourning and dystopian criticism. Furthermore, it forces us to acknowledge ugliness, strangeness, and illness, which is using aesthetics of the ugly as a critical mode of awareness: ugliness signifies chaos, weirdness, and corruption, coexisting with and complicit in ecology's skepticism and withdrawal.
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Therefore, the “dark” mode of thinking abandons anthropocentrism and enlightened rational progress, shatters the single power structure of authoritarianism and patriarchy, and gradually develops into a post-disaster dispersed form: a faint echo resonating with all things in the darkness, a shared sense of illness amidst collapse, and a self-reflective melancholy, entanglement, and compassion.