Second Nature Surfing

Culture is a jumbled mess, a swamp-like field of quasi-actualised possibilities, exacerbated ego-landscapes, state-(under)funded canopies, burnt out artistic praxes, and impenetrable curatorial texts. Although sifting through these dense gatekept bushworks can at times yield noteworthy finds, the trek is nevertheless dangerous. A machete-wielding stalker is required. I sat down in one such marshy online meadow with a possible guide, the artist Sebastian Big, in hopes that he might show us some safe paths through this wilderness.

Sebastian’s practice is multimodal and plurivalent to say the least: poet, painter, theorist, translator, online scavenger, professional subcultural scubadiver, meme historian, and Zarathustra-esque mountaineer.

CD: Hello, and thank you for agreeing to meet. I’ve been a long-time observer of your output and have many questions for you. For starters, here’s one that has been bugging me for some time. Who is Xavier Antipa?

SB: Xavier Antipa started as a pseudonym, but over time became more like a device for thinking. I was interested in the way identities are constructed online, how authorship fragments and multiplies across platforms, archives, and communities. Antipa allowed me to move between roles—writer, researcher, painter, nettime.org troll—without having to stabilize them into a single coherent persona. In a way, he is both real and fictional. Like many things on the internet, he exists somewhere between documentation and myth.

CD: You studied philosophy. How did you make the transition to the arts?

SB: For me, there was never a clear transition because philosophy and art were always intertwined. Philosophy taught me how to formulate questions, but art gave me a way to inhabit them. Eventually, I became more interested in situations where ideas collide with materials, images, stories, and social realities. Art offered a larger field of experimentation. Instead of only writing about the world, I could build small models of it, explore its contradictions, and sometimes get lost inside them.

CD: One of your earliest endeavours was a series of zines, culminating in the immense meme study guide entitled CRASHOMON. How did it come to be? What was it like to be online in the early days of internet cafes, dial-up modems, and budding peer-to-peer networks?

SB: The internet of the late 1990s and early 2000s felt less like a platform and more like a frontier. It was fragmented, chaotic, full of strange communities and accidental discoveries. You had to actively search for things. Information did not come to you through algorithmic feeds; you wandered through forums, FTP servers, message boards, and peer-to-peer networks.

CRASHOMON emerged from a fascination with this ecosystem and with memes before they became a marketing category. At the time, internet culture felt like a collective folk practice. People endlessly copied, mutated, mistranslated, and repurposed cultural material. I wanted to document that process and treat it seriously—as a form of vernacular creativity and distributed storytelling. The guide became an archive of a moment when the internet still felt relatively wild.

CD: Together with Ștefan Tiron, you started a subcultural scuba-diving practice (archived on the blog zăcământ). One of your prime diving spots was the world of the Romanian underground-garage-home-made karate scene. What attracted you to this zone in particular?

SB: What fascinated us was that it existed almost entirely outside official culture. It was a self-organized mythology built from VHS tapes, television fragments, local improvisation, and genuine passion. People were recreating martial arts worlds with extremely limited resources, producing their own heroes, legends, aesthetics, and narratives.

We were interested in these parallel cultural universes because they revealed how imagination functions at the grassroots level. They challenged the distinction between authenticity and imitation. The homemade karate scene was not simply copying global culture—it was transforming it into something distinctly local and often surreal.

CD: In 2008, you made The Black Angels, a feature-length documentary-presenting work further exploring this karateverse, but focusing this time on some urban legends regarding urban kidnapping and underground ninja societies in the sewers. I would very much like to learn more about how it came into being.

SB: The project grew out of years of collecting stories, rumours, newspaper clippings, amateur videos, and oral accounts. What interested me was not whether these stories were true but why they persisted. Urban legends are collective dreams. They reveal social anxieties, desires, and blind spots.

The figure of the sewer ninja, for example, occupied this strange space between crime, fantasy, martial arts mythology, and post-socialist uncertainty. The Black Angels was an attempt to take these narratives seriously without reducing them to either documentary fact or fiction. We wanted to explore the zone where reality and imagination continuously contaminate one another.

CD: You have always been interested in nature and ecology, a theme reflected in your literary outputs. Is poetry sustainable? What role does critique play in this murky cultural field? What chance does the (new and improved) self have in the wake of the infinite corporation’s instrumentalisation of capital’s sentience?

SB: I think poetry remains sustainable precisely because it is inefficient. It produces no obvious utility, and that is its strength. Poetry preserves spaces of ambiguity and attention that increasingly disappear under regimes of optimization and extraction.

As for critique, I have become somewhat skeptical of its heroic self-image. Critique often imagines itself standing outside the system, but in reality it is usually entangled within it. This does not make critique useless; it simply means that it should be practiced with humility.

Regarding the self, I suspect the situation is less dramatic than many contemporary theories suggest. The corporation, the state, the platform, the market—these are all cultural constructions that often present themselves as autonomous forces. But ultimately, they remain embedded within larger ecological processes. Culture constantly imagines itself as separate from nature, yet everything it produces eventually becomes nature again. The self is not outside this cycle. Neither is capital. Neither is critique.

CD: More recently, you returned to creating artistic artefacts. Your paintings present post-capitalist naturescapes, in which the few remaining people grapple with the remnants of a bygone culture. Why this temporal detour?

SB: I do not see it as a detour into the future or the past so much as a way of looking at the present from a different angle. The paintings imagine a world in which our institutions, ideologies, and ambitions have already become archaeological remains. What interests me is not catastrophe itself but perspective.

We live in a culture obsessed with management, control, planning, and endless production. Yet history repeatedly demonstrates how fragile these constructions are. Nature is not something outside culture waiting to reclaim it. Culture itself is a natural phenomenon. Every empire, every ideology, every technological system eventually enters larger ecological cycles.

The figures in the paintings inhabit that realization. They move through the ruins of grand narratives much like children searching for the affection of a mother they believed absent, only to discover that they had never truly left mother-nature in the first place. The work is less about apocalypse than about humility. It asks what remains when our fantasies of mastery finally dissolve.

CD: Lastly, I would like to say that your online-archived endeavours in part inspired this journal to probe the depth of various sub-cultural phenomena. Any advice for the track ahead?

SB: My advice would be to remain curious, patient, and suspicious of categories. The most interesting cultural phenomena are often the ones that appear insignificant at first glance. Official culture tends to direct our attention toward what is already recognized as important, but some of the richest discoveries happen in forgotten forums, local legends, amateur productions, niche obsessions, and communities that exist below the threshold of visibility.

Try not to approach subcultures as an anthropologist studying exotic tribes from a safe distance. Learn their language. Understand their internal logic. Every subculture is, in a sense, a theory of the world.

At the same time, resist the temptation to romanticize the underground. Marginality does not automatically produce authenticity or wisdom. Subcultures contain the same contradictions, power dynamics, vanities, and absurdities as any other social formation. What makes them interesting is not their purity but their inventiveness.

In the end, I think the task is less about discovering hidden worlds than about developing the sensitivity to recognize that hidden worlds are everywhere. You just have to learn how to look.

Perhaps the first artists were not those who painted animals in caves, but those who sat and watched them. Before image came attention. Before representation came immersion. A hunter might spend hours observing a herd, a forest, a river, learning nature's rhythms long before attempting to depict them. The cave painting was not the beginning of art, but its residue—a trace left behind after a deep and patient encounter with the world.