The project proposed for this year’s ICA Fellowship is the archive & augmented reality experience of the Virtual Bassmint, an online electronic music party curated by myself, DORMANTYOUTH. This experiential archive is set in a series of fictional rooms modelled after parkades and basement parking spaces found around Johannesburg. Due to the real, tangible spaces that this online venue is based on being temporal and non-anthropocantric in function, its appropriation for this super specific subcultural gathering is not only appropriate but ideal for this type of event (as seen throughout the history of rave/youth culture, especially within marginalised communities).

This venue is to be explored and ‘walked’ around using keyboard and mouse controls, moving from room to room while the user experiences the 45 minute recordings of each performance, spanning from the beginning of lockdown. Performances focus more on more recent Virtual Bassmint shows because of the quality of sound recording. Performances by local and international underground/independent DJs, producers, and visual artists are displayed and archived in this Parkade Project, cementing their relevance and importance of experiences of the ‘Other’ within this speculated symbolic structure of post-capitalist urbanity.