Gates is also interested in fringe culture, something that the present study finds synonymous with alternative culture. As part of Sanctum’s promotional material, it is regularly suggested that Gates employs a “working principle of seeing and reflecting upon the unseen, unvisited and under-heard” (Gates, 2015). This is the culture which we can assume to be alternative, subcultural, counter-cultural and post-subcultural. In many ways Gates acts as a cultural catalyst, because he brings “unseen, unvisited and under-heard” artists to the forefront of their context-specific circumstances, this culture experiences an amount of additional cultural interchange as a result of this additional exposure. All of this activity enters into a relationship with mainstream culture and the effects of culture held in a cartel. For his essay ‘Weightless Data: The New Heavy Freight’, designer and author Adrian Shaughnessy is conscious of these modes of cultural oppression, he explains how digital networks such as the internet have challenged conventional methods of distributing culture, good and services, etc. he goes on to asserts that contemporary modes of distribution have: “been largely taken over by the oligarchs of Silicon Valley, every system, every regime, has within it the seed of its own subversion.” (Shaughnessy, 2018, p.56) What Shaughnessy alludes to is the assumed state of equilibrium our culture is subject to, as presently the culture industry is subject to an amount of easily controlled digital oppression, for Shaughnessy the “seed of its own subversion” has already been planted and indeed the results of a counter-culture might already be in development, for example, the rebirth of retro physical products such as vinyl and tape records.
