 The aspect of your work that maybe fascinates me the most is your engagement with the figure of the Goblin. And I think that embracing the Goblin in us all—of seeing the Goblin as this kind of abject figure. It’s this stereotypical Other, at least as it's generally conceived of in high fantasy. It seems like the perfect material to be sublated, to be understood as a new metaphor for humanity in crisis and at the risk of losing itself. Do you see that figure of the Goblin entering into the sword works?



 I think they're related. I think you're exactly right to say that they are the ambiguous Other of fantasy. What's funny is that they often represent the layperson. In “Warhammer,” the orc has, like, a Cockney accent. Games Workshop, the company behind “Warhammer,” was started in the ’80s in England. So, it's supposed to be the stand in, essentially, for working class, blue collar laborers. “Lord of the Rings,” too. I guess the swords are playing more with high fantasy trying to bring in the orcish aesthetics. Like, things made out of bone or things made out of moss and fungus, instead of things made out of metal. What I'm doing with those, more than anything, comes in with the materiality. The material for the swords is all this extruded insulation foam. Pink insulation foam. Everybody knows what it looks like because they've seen it in their house or Home Depot or whatever. But, it's all made from fossil fuels. And the roots of those are like these algal and fungal blooms that existed for a long time. So, for me, a lot of it was this idea from partially reading “Cyclonopedia” by Reza Negarestani. Having it be, like, the petrofungal consciousness. The petrobiotic consciousness seems so linked to this idea in “Warhammer” where it's almost the all-knowing fungus of the orcs. And I think that was what I was most attracted to. It's not the specific symbolism. There's a little bit of it there, but it's mostly just this idea of this all-corrupting material basis for things—which is just like the petrochemical or fungal nature of both of these things.



 The orc is at the root of all life, potentially. That resonates a lot for me in terms of the kind of Gnostic duality between material existence and divinity, from which it is entirely separated. So, the petrochemical, algal-based substance of the orc is at the heart of all life.



 What’s the evil God in Gnosticism called?



 Yaldabaoth, also called the Demiurge. Demiurge literally translates as “the Craftsman.”



 Yeah, it's like Demiurgic Accelerationism. Exactly. It's the idea of people who feel a sense of comfort in being basely material, and that material base corrupting these logical orders placed on top of things.

Harris Rosenblum’s recent work is concerned with subverting contemporary materialities to create windows into a space of pure fantasy. Insulation foam is shaped into a grotesque blade, over ten feet long, fit to be wielded by a Dark Souls boss. A 3D-printed reliquary contains a miniature Space Marine from Warhammer 40k. Yet this subversion of matter is problematized by the question of what is lost in the entrance into history, into materiality. What of the Idea survives? What is corrupted? And what of the Divine remains in Base Matter?