Darkleaks – The Ripper Genome is a unique collaboration between Jeremy Reed and Martin Bladh that revisits the Jack the Ripper case from a brave new angle. Reed and Bladh are preoccupied less with who Jack the Ripper was than with who he became, his compulsions genetically scrambled into amalgams of hardwired obsession that re-manifest themselves in the figures of Ballard, Burroughs, Bacon, Peter Christopherson and Valerie Solanas, as though history were being driven on by the haywire velocity of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, backfiring for a few instants into the poetry of Baudelaire but always centrifuged into the contemporary moment. The figure of Jack the Ripper disintegrates into multiple entities of obsessional creativity and murderous fixations, across London’s wastelanded, scorchearthed streets, only navigable via the blood-spurted vectors emitted from that multiplied figure’s victims.