The spread of advanced technology in everyday life has accompanied a retreat of religious language from mainstream culture. Not long ago, religion was more than a means of attaining amoral compass, the source of "values" that it is today. Although it still does take this tendency in certain cultures and circumstances, religion once was, throughout the world, the text of a cosmology that describes the way the world works. Religion was the key to explaining the mysteries of life, and even when its cosmology was proved wrong, its larger cultural weight served as a point of departure for more detailed, scientific discoveries. The motion of the spheres, the aetheric whispers of the electromagnetic spectrum, the heaving and quaking of the ball of matter we live upon--historically, these phenomena were not correctly understood by religious or spiritual explanations, but at least they were a place to start. The Galileos of the world needed a cosmology to refute, if they were going to move closer to what we call truth.

In the shadows of myths, a new entity builds itself. It is called Dark Theory, and in the dark, it grows. From the broken pieces rubble, it constructs a new mortar, pasting itself up from the midden pits of cultural discards, the unwanted substance of thousands of years of stories and folktales, naming conventions, official designations, and jurisprudence. This excised material, this societal negative space, reassembles into a sprawling favela of unmapped streets. Like ancient books resurrected into new artwork by a counter-culture with insurgent spirit and a taste for its own blood, the darkness is cataloged, analyzed, and bootlegged, becoming dangerous and feral, in that it has been pried out from its history, and set upon new, machined legs.