Investigation and metawarfare as the fraternal twin faces of cryptography have been the object of ASID’s veneration since its inception. Crypto’s ascendancy is the critical catastrophe of our time. It constitutes a threshold at which the substance of trade is unveiled to have always already been something else than what it was previously assumed to be — and exchange is fundamental, the economy is the cosmos, as time is value. Decrypting the topography of time from its involvement in the evolution of matter, the inquiry into the synthesised corruption of the continuity between Chronos and Kairos by the timechain renders the new world dis-order analgesically masochistic.

Even beyond the ecological sense immediately apparent, the cryptocene melts down the world to let a more refined nature, which had all along lain latent within it, emerge from its attendant pulp. The unfolding of creation is the disinterment of that which has been buried in the transcendental crypt of time. It is only fitting that ‘A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System’, as one of the crucial twists in this gothic story, is published on the witches’ sabbath of Samhain.

The offering ASID presents to the daimon of music industry is a series of recurrent events, most aligned with personalized global start allignmets. In the guise of a game, this format crossfades between video, alternate reality, and live action role playing variants thereof. In that of ritual, it sees itself simultaneously in the tradition of 20th century secret societies and the ultimately archaic mystery religion they resurrect. While these mysteries provide thought, testing itself against the ultimate problem of understanding the nature of time, with an entry into the human mind, AI and proof-of-work make for an exit from this cage.

Datacombs of overcoded computational poetry interlink runners within an HTML-brutalist sacred hypertext adventure. Pseudo-scientific prose mingles with gamebook protocols to reveal subterranean passageways between technocommercial developments and eschatology. Fragmented cinematrographic and 3DCG imagery wields a machine gothic grotesquerie, darkside of the technical sublime. The soundtrack distends the reverberations of dungeon synth into monophonic hymns of hard-surface SFX and geotraumatic wailing — sonically simulated time-environments populated by cavernous urban spaces where the machinic unconscious of global trade pulses arrhythmically. A patchwork of crypto-followers enters into communion as these independently developed streams of information coincide, and it is this which amounts to a ceremonial occurrence. If gatherings can be taken off-site.

Functionally, this is an abstract tool to allow the user a reciprocally exciting engagement with those dynamics of architectonic rearticulation that occur at the outermost scale. It is a means for thought to once more happen sooner digitally than in the head. As models of the way that nature persists in itself, both rituals and games facilitate learning about the dynamics at play in a system with a depth that is unattainable by conventional means. The price of ritualistic anarchy in these game sessions is conceived as fluctuating manifestations of the users' energy. Synchronised with astrophysical cycles, they enable informal unfoldings of electromagnetic intellectual improvisations and connect thermodynamic ego/logies emerging from within. One aspect is eucharistic, modelling spontaneous convergence upon an order occulted in nature by its prior disintegration. The religiously atheistic (in short, pagan) foundation for the eucharist is the subtraction of overseeing 3rd parties also referred to by P2P: the death of god makes taking matters into one’s own hands – magic – not only possible, but necessary. At the same time, and therefore identically, this ceremony operates as a tarot in that each run of its individual constituents assembling into a novel order is an instance of the game’s lore bootstrapping itself.