hyperpop and glitch art

09 Aug 2020

The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.
-Toni Cade Bambara

It is no secret that current trends in fashion, music, cinema, etc. are usually heavily influenced by past periods or aesthetics. As I was listening to Jessie Ware’s new album What’s Your Pleasure?, feeling like this sound was directly sourced from the 80s, I couldn’t help but to try to make some parallels between old and new art phenomenons that I enjoy.

Is hyperpop the new rock ‘n’ roll?

Hyperpop is quite new, like it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page now as I’m writing this. But cultural magazines and websites are already on it, trying to define it and to offer some guide to navigate it, some wondering if this new genre is the future of music, and Spotify has already an official hyperpop playlist.

Somewhat similar to PC Music, hyperpop is (that’s my personal take on this) a satyric magnifying glass of pop music with an electronic twist. Overly explicit lyrics, exploration of dark themes on uplifting beat, glitch-like sound are a few characteristics of a typical hyperpop song. The artist SOPHIE is one of the chef de file, and I think her song Faceshopping depict well the vibe and general message of hyperpop. Poppy is also a good example of hyperpop in my opinion (and her whole story is so postmodern in some way). Songs like her Play Destroy track may be an easier entry point to hyperpop.

Don’t get me wrong : I’m not saying that hyperpop sounds like rock’n’roll, we are very far from that. I’m wondering if hyperpop is the new rock’n’roll in its cultural manifestation of rebellion against the status quo.

Lately I have fell across a wonderful book called Season of the Witch : How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll by Bebergal Peter, and that what sparked my interrogation. Here’s a quote from it :

Just as religious traditions have always sought to make sense of their own pagan origins — usually by prohibiting and demonizing the old gods — ministers, parents, and record-burning mobs saw in rock the threat of sex and chaos. Rock’s response was its true salvation : musician pushes out further, conjuring spirits with power chords. When rock was finding its electric sound and its hormonal teenage audience, it chose sex as its expression of agitation. This was its first claim to autonomy, a wriggle of the hips in the face of the religious hierarchy.

This sexual and chaotic component is also to be found in hyperpop. The fear that instilled rock’n’roll could also be instilled by hyperpop artists, even if many of them like to play with the hyper-feminine, the bad and the ugly is never completely exclude from their aesthetic.

Nowadays, religion isn’t this much present, at least, religion isn’t the number one reason of oppression. But I like to think that neoliberalism (and capitalism in general) is the new religion. In that line of thought, there’s a brilliant academic text that compares neoliberalism to a political theology of chance, or, in other words, a politics of divination, but I won’t dive any further in this idea here. Nonetheless, the critics of capitalism and of patriarchy inherent to many hyperpop tracks could, in my opinion, be seen as the hyperpop “wriggle of the hips in the face” of the new world order. And I am also a firm believer of Foucault’s ideas that the repression of sexuality is the ultimate tool of control, therefore I see in this often hypersexualized music a great revolutionary potential.

Right now, I’m trying to find “occult hyperpop” to see if I can check more common points between the rock’n’roll content and the hyperpop’s, but since the occult is getting slowly repopularized I suppose it’s coming eventually.

Is glitch art the new pop art?

Pop art is an art movement from the 1940-1950 from which emerged the iconic Campbell soups artwork by Andy Warhol. Very colorful, and very anchored in the new consummation way of living, here’s some interesting things Wikipedia says about it:

One of [pop art] aims is to use images of popular (as opposed to elitist) culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any culture, most often through the use of irony. It is also associated with the artists’ use of mechanical means of reproduction or rendering techniques. In pop art, material is sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, or combined with unrelated material.

And here’s how Wikipedia again defines glitch art :

Glitch art is the practice of using digital or analog errors for aesthetic purposes by either corrupting digital data or physically manipulating electronic devices.

Other keywords linked to glitch art are databending and datamoshing. Glitch art also reached the realms of sex, as glitch porn became a thing. And also here’s an interactive article to understand how digital images work and how easy it is to glitch them.

In 1940, artists like Andy Warhol were impressed by the efficiency of technology. Today, we are realizing how imperfect those technologies actually are. But they are similitude.

For example, glitch art can be produced by almost anybody (therefore isn’t elitist). Open-source software like byebyte allows user to “destroy their files in the name of art” in one simple command line. Glitch art is necessarily created through technological mediums, and also plays with confusion around the context of the subject.

I’m personally more interest in glitch porn than glitch art in general though. Like Louise Matsakis from Vice said :

When you’re looking at a distorted naked torso, or a pixelated couple embracing, it’s impossible to forget you’re viewing them on a screen. You can’t fantasize the subjects are there in front of you, which is what so much of porn is usually about.

And I think it’s something worth coming back to. But the intersection of sex and technology is a gigantic rabbit-hole, so I don’t want to start rambling about that. (But I’ll let here my favorite podcast on the subject, Future of Sex, and the digital zine I’m currently reading on the matter.)

And also, I want to state that I’m not expert in “glitch studies”, but I’ll link here the short version of the Glitch Studies Manifesto of Beyond Resolution.

We can remember ourselves that “Pop Art appreciates popular culture, or what we also call ‘material culture’. It does not critique the consequences of materialism and consumerism; it simply recognizes its pervasive presence as a natural fact”, as stated on ThoughtCo. While the Glitch Studies Manifesto suggest to “[u]tilize glitches to bring any medium in a critical state of hypertrophy, to (subsequently) criticize its inherent politics”, which makes it more political than pop art for say. But there is, in glitch art, a part of this “simple recognition” of the everlasting presence of glitches (instead of materialism) in our technological societies, which could be seen as an actualized take of pop art’s realization since our economy and lives are now way more immaterial than ever.

But yeah, I’m very excited to dig deeper in glitch studies and I’m also experimenting on creating glitch art myself, so no matter if my pop art parallel wasn’t very accurate or relevant in the first place (same thing with my hyperpop and rock’n’roll), I’m glad it gave me an excuse to explore more those fields.

synchronicity leading to Buddhism and robots

27 Jul 2020

I have been reading about Buddhist philosophy since high school. I need to partly thank Buddhism for escaping the last dark period of my life. But I’m bad at following traditions, and I often ‘‘forget about Buddhism’’ even though I’m convinced many of the core principles of Buddhism have sink in forever in me.

I’ve been following the Zen Studies Podcast since 2018 but it was not until recently that I started again to listen to Domyo Burk’s teachings. Since I have been overthinking a lot recently (namely because I’m reading so many interesting things and meeting such new interesting people), I felt like I needed to find refuge somewhere or else I couldn’t sustain my lifestyle.

So yeah, here I am going back to my buddhist practice, and I’m working hard on not giving up all my other intellectual pursuits just to focus on it because it is one big relief to refocus on medidation and zen in general. So, a way my brain tricked myself into not doing that is incorporating buddhism in my science-fiction writing project. We can read while my main protagonist are at the Crypt, the base of a queer secret society planning to overcome the new world dictatorship :

AImarita introduced Utena as one of the main Priestix of the Crypt. They shook hand and Utena quickly left.
‘’I didn’t know you had religion here’’, commented Sasha afterward.
‘’Well the Crypt was founded by Buddhist witches, but the cult is not obligatory.’’
Sasha knew that Buddhism was one of the religion of the past but didn’t know any of them survived.
‘’There is dharma talks every day at eleven if you are curious to see how it looks. Nnedi always go, maybe you could accompany her.’’

And since my universe is one of science-fiction where androids, cyborgs and humans coexist, I started to research about how Buddhism perceive robots and I fell upon this marvelous text. And now I have no choice but to incorporate more Buddhism in my utopian studies. As I’m also reading for the first time right now Battle Angel Alita, I need to say that his week I especially love Japan.

Once again I have no intention of summarizing the text in its entirety (I recommend everybody interested in the subject to read it themselves), but here’s some interesting points I want to go back to later:

• To not model robots on the ‘‘flawed human’’ but on the Buddhist practitioner who’s compassion driven, how does that translate in real code? I gotta see what the Mukta Institude is doing. And also this text on Ubuntu (not the OS) as a framework for AI can help me figure this out.
• The question of robot design, namely sex dolls, in regard of this quote by Kawaguchi:

“To a certain degree, we feel empathy and attraction to a humanlike object; but one tiny design change, and suddenly we are full of fear and revulsion.”

• and maybe a question tiré par les cheveux but could a certain ‘‘body diversity’’ in robots (because the quote suggests the design of robots looking like robots and not trying to replicate human form) help humans to accept the body diversity of their own specie (hello fatphobia)?
• The general potential of the Buddhist philosophy of putting everything as equals (men, women, animals, plants, robots, objects…) in the articulation of anarchist (revolutinnary?) narratives

EDIT 24/08/2020 : It’s funny how everything is cyclical sometimes. I was re-reading some old blog posts, and came accross one on Buddhism I wrote in 2018. I thought this part could be a nice add-on to this recent post.

Dans un autre ordre d’idée, je suis tombée dernièrement sur cet article qui tente d’expliquer pourquoi le monde occidental craint l’intelligence artificielle tandis que celui oriental semble inconditionnellement enthousiaste à ce sujet. L’auteur, le Japonais Joi Ito, de ce dernier fait reposer son explication sur la différence intrinsèque entre les religions orientales et celles occidentales. En effet, d’un côté, les religions chrétiennes mettent l’espèce humaine sur un pied d’éstade – le dissociant du reste du monde – et disent que croire en autres choses que Dieu est blasphématoire. Il n’est pas surprenant que l’apparition d’une intelligence supérieure puisse les inquiéter. Étonnamment, certaines sectes chrétiennes s’adaptent à cette réalité en intégrant le transhumanisme dans leur croyance, notamment les mormons (à ce sujet, je vous suggère ce balado). De l’autre côté, le shintoïsme et le bouddhisme prônent que tout a une vie, tout est égal et interrelié : la plante, l’animal et l’humain ont une valeur similaire. Ainsi, pour eux, un robot est facile à appréhender comme égal plutôt qu’inquiétant, voire bienvenu. Évidemment, d’autres facteurs, comme la culture populaire, influencent nos perceptions sur l’intelligence artificielle, mais il est intéressant de voir comment la religion peut expliquer partiellement cela.

association vs domination

25 Jul 2020

a new framework

This could be some kind of temporary conclusion to the train of thought of On Gender Abolition and Matriarchy and Speculation on the Impact of the Loss of Matriarchy, where, let’s remind ourselves, I was examining namely:

• Agender society of The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Womanhood and woman psyche, why is it somewhat broken and how to possibly “fix it”
• What would mean the come-back of matriarchy

I left those texts thinking matriarchy didn’t sound quite right to me, as I’m interested in non-hierarchical systems and as I still have the impression that genders are some not-that-usefull constructs nowadays.

And then I fell upon The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler (1987) and I was delighted to discover a brilliant framework that would suit so well my inner-comprehension of the world.

Riane Eisler, with The Chalice and the Blade, revisits history, from prehistory through our time, with a feminist and critical perspective. She also tries to create a new language to talk about the duality humanity faces, and I will try to use this new language myself in the future.

This post is not an attempt at writing a synthesis of this book, but I shall leave here the Wikipedia page on the theory developed in it, since I think it is well constructed. But if we want to sum up the main ideas, Eisler suggests namely that :

• the nature of humanity’s history is cyclical, as in we are oscillating between two models of culture/society
• those two models would be the domination model (patriarchy) and the partnership model (matriarchy), which is translated in French in modèle d’association
• but to interpreted that as a war on gender is not productive (and not accurate), therefore Eisler creates new words to describe patriarchy and matriarchy, respectively andocraty and gylany.
• to think outside the gender limitation, she put the emphasis on the symbolism of the chalice and the blade : whereas the chalice gives life the blade take it, and we have been in a society ‘‘ruled by the blade’’ for a while now
• with archeological data, she suggests that past society that were labelled as matriarchy were not truly ruled by women, but closer to her partnership model where everybody is equal
• she also suggests that utopian society like the lost city of Atlantis probably existed (it would have been the Mycenaean people ), and that therefore we can expect society to reach “utopian standards” in the real world

That’s enough bullet points for today. But I haven’t reached the most interesting part in my opinion, at least, the most interesting part for my intellectual revolutionary pursuit.

In her work, she portrays women as an historical force porteur du flambeau of the partnership model. And for the domination model to thrive they had no choice but to repress manifestation of this alternative vision, and that could explain why women suffered so much throughout history. She states that period of peace and of cultural development must have been followed by a belligerent period namely in an attempt of the domination model to reaffirm his superiority in glorifying its values, namely courage, competitiveness and strength.

Because the thing is, according to Leisler, that to have a strong domination model, (toxic) masculinity must be strongly valued in one’s society. And this is the idea that sparked the most excitement in me.

I always was into the “queer cause”, but I remember a moment while I was very involved in environmental activism I thought that it was pointless to “advocate for such issues if the world is going to die (because of climate changes) anyway”, thought that I totally discard today. But reading Leiser’s book was like an ah-ah moment allowing me to connect yet another dot in the schema of the complex world we live in.

Even if identity politics aren’t unanimously considered pertinent or powerful enough to promote big-scale social changes, Leisler’s idea bring an interesting take on it. To personally refuse the gender binary, or the stereotypes link to genders, is one piece in the puzzle of shattering everything to the ground. And I already said it, but will say it again : diversity of tactics is essential. It makes me happy to be able to picture my own struggle and micro-rebellious acts as part of a bigger guerrilla machine.

So I just let the seed sink in : I am looking forward deepening this idea, but for now I am very excited to continue to explore Riane Eisler’s theory. I borrowed her The Real Wealth of Nations : Creating a Caring Economics, which sounds capitalistic, but The Chalice and the Blade showed me anarchy occupies a place in her heart, therefore I should probably not worry too much.

EDIT 30/07/2020: I have found in the The Real Wealth of Nations a quote that summarize well the concepts of the domination system and partnership system :

In the domination system, there are only two alternatives for relations : dominating or being dominated. Those on top control those below them — be it in families, workplace, or society at large. Economic policies and practices in this system are designed to benefit those on top at the expense of those on the bottom. Trust is scarce and tension is high, as the whole system is largely held together by fear and force.

To maintain rankings of domination, caring and empathy have to be suppressed and devalued, beginning in families and from there to economics and politics. This is why one of the foundations for a caring econimics consists of beliefs and institutions that orient more to the partnership system.

The partnership system supports mutualy respectufl and caring relations. There are still hierarchies, as there must be to get things done. But in these hierarchies, which I call hierarchies of actualization rather than hierarchies of domination, accoutability and respect flow both ways rather than just from the bottom up, and social end economic structures are set up so that there is input from all levels. Leaders and managers facilitate, inspire, and empower rather than control and disempower. Economic policies and practices in this system are designed to support our basic survival needs and ours needs for community, creativity, meaning, and caring — in other words, the realization of our highest human potentials.

This idea of hierarchies of actualization echoes with some of the stuff I was saying in Internet, subcultures, autonomous zones and narratives.

it always goes back to ambitopia

20 Jul 2020

what I’m covering bellow

• utopia as a concept, its paradoxes
• difference between speculative fiction and utopia
• angst on dystopia, capitalist realism
• the role of the artist and ambitopia

When we look up what is the signification of the word utopia, we realize it means at once the “perfect place” and the “no place”. And when we look at, for say, H.G Wells or Thomas More utopians writings, we indeed understand that the world they show are completely fictional. This “perfect place”/”no-place” paradox is already one of interesting thoughts, but contemporary writings had brought another one. The textbook example is “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin, where the reader is invited to explore their own dream-city only to discover that this dreamy vision can only be achieved through the suffering of one slave-child who will never be able to feel love or joy in their life. And with this story line a new paradox for the reader occurred : they need to choose for themselves what is utopia and what is dystopia, while acknowledging that it might not be “mutually exclusive”. And this thought experiment can easily leave the fictional framework and be applied to the world we live in.

But the utopia genre is not only define by its contradictions. It also need to showcase a society, which isn’t perfect but somewhat seeks perfection, but, in all cases, is better than the reader’s current society. And, according to Wikipedia, it is one sub-genre among many of the umbrella-term of speculative fiction, which can be define as “a broad category of fiction […] with certain elements that do not exist in the real world, often in the context of supernatural, futuristic or other imaginative themes” whilst utopia specifically explores “social and political structures”. Well, debatable.

If you google “2019 speculative fiction”, you can find plenty of books to read. There is also great podcasts on the matter like SF in Translation. But if you look up “2019 utopian novels”, you’ll find hardly any. Change utopian for dystopian. Bingo, plenty again.

The thing is first, I abhor dystopia, and, second, I dislike the term speculative fiction, since it sounds utterly scientific and cold.

I mean, I can recognize that some dystopias can create some interesting things literature-wise, but that is mostly it. I have already mentioned in an earlier text the concept of capitalist realism who poses this idea that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. And when I first discovered this concept, I was like, yeah, and dystopias are very great incarnations of this theory. But then I fell upon this podcast episode of the Revolutionary Left Radio and realized that dystopias weren’t neutral.

I already want to state that I’m not trying to claim that all dystopian writers are full of bad intentions (anyway, writers are mirrors). And after all, contemporary interpretation of dystopias are “that they are warning signs” before all, not an invitation to make the world a worst place. Nonetheless, there is something very insidious with them. Since we are at this point of history where part of the bigger narrative is to say that we have reached a cul-de-sac and that only the capitalist system can work even though it’s not optimal, dystopias somewhat encourage this perpetuation of the status quo as they suggest that the alternatives can only be worst.

I mean, it is true that the climate will get worse in the years to come. But truly, not everything has to get worse. And allow me to make a quick detour on the environmental subject, I can understand the popularity of “doomer lit”, this new hot genre which explores a future where the protagonists are at the mercy of climate changes because we failed taking actions on the matter. Like we indeed need to accept the grief relative to the climate (and the loss of fauna and flora) as we knew it in order to accept its reality, and be able to be proactive again on the matter.

Nonetheless, even if, in one hand, we truly cannot control of the biosphere, in the other hand, we are in control of how we organize human society and therefore I refuse doom literature in this area. As a writer myself, I understand how easy it is to fall in the dystopia trap (my imaginary is full of it), but if I fall in it, I will do my possible to turn it into an ambitopia.

It is not the first time I cheer for the ambitopia neologism. For those hearing the term for the first time, an ambitopian story would be one where we follow the making of an utopia. “The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible”, they say. The revolutionary craving might not be for everybody yet, therefore I think that, in the present moment, the artist also needs to create hope-food, and to help the normalization of the actual process of “i-get-my-hands-dirty-trying-to-build-something-different” (in opposition of simply rethinking life). Solarpunk is namely a very good example of what I would like to see more of in the world.

But in and of itself, utopias are great and it’s a shame there is not much utopian literature in the mainstream, and I really think we should reclaim this genre in parallel of the ambitopia-making.

But maybe something from the utopia subreddit I was unaware of will emerge and blow my mind in a near future, who knows. In the meantime I will continue my course on utopian and dystopian literature (the guidebook of it is on the Internet Archive) and enjoy the fact that I haven’t read all the utopian materials available on Earth.

And just realized that I’m officially repeating myself since 2018, does that make me an expert on the matter?

speculation on the impact of the loss of matriarchy

02 Jul 2020

and on the loss of a proper womanhood

Could women have lost their womanhood of the old days because they have nothing to collectively nurture and care about anymore?

As an introduction to some tentative of answer to that question, we can remember ourselves that women have somewhat lost their freedom with the advent of the concept of private property, most precisely, with the concept of heritage. Indeed, when societies started to have surplus and wealth, people would want to bequeath to their offspring, and since it was then patriarchal, they had no choice but to ‘‘chain women to monogamy’’ since male would want to know which children are legitimate (we can not know who’s with certitude the person who impregnated a woman, therefore a woman should only be allowed to have sex with one person). Thing that could have been spared if the matriarchy, or at least, matrilineal heritage, had remained, since it is quite simple to acknowledge who’s the legitimate mother of a child.

By having switched to patriarchy at this point of history, we can’t say that women already had lost a great deal of power and this inequality gap of freedom grew bigger with the time, to then hypothetically become a bit smaller in modern time. We can say that many factors isolated women across history, namely taboos and the nuclear family. I will hypothesize that alienation became more intense with the rise of capitalism, where everything slowly became an ‘‘objet de consommation’’, women included. This, mixed with years of conditioning saying that a woman’s sole purpose is to marry and have kids, has decidedly made the woman weaker in and of itself, but also weaker as womanhood.

The monogamous nature of the occidental society plus the capitalism mindset was a harsh recipe for the feminine psyche, building a feeling of competition among women, centrally based of the idea of desirability, desirability in regards of being especially beautiful and submissive (to men). This probably hasn’t created a culture of cultivation of the inner-world, therefore weakening again the feminine.

One of the question that I need to bring to the table in this examination, and to whom I have no empiric answer in the moment, is ‘‘what does a woman of the matriarchy would have had to fear of another woman?’’ I somewhat feel like that there was nothing to feared of, but I shall come back to this interrogation another day. So let’s go back to a hypothetical world where we bring back matriarchy.

I suggested yesterday in my text On Gender Abolition and Matriarchy that to put women in charge of society could be extremely beneficial for the people. I wrote that it could be somewhat the ultimate healing path to fix femininity related traumas. I kind of believe that in this text as well. And the other layer I add here, is that I think, like my first question suggest, that women have become enemies (or at least, didn’t cultivate strong and enriching sisterhood) namely because they started lacking a common goal, which could have been in the past the maintenance of society, or at least of some communities/bigger families. Like stated in the Gender Abolition and Matriarchy text, women usually respond to stress with ‘‘a tend and befriend’’ reaction, therefore to try to rule society again could help them get along again (I know it is highly simplified here, but we are speculating).

Then my brain makes some weird questions arise. I wonder then if the ‘‘desirability trap’’ would then ‘‘happen to men’’. Like, if matriarchy equals strong sisterhood, therefore less competition, because common goal, would that mean that we are ‘‘stealing the common goal’’ of men, and then removing that from their equation of manhood, make it possibly weaker? Is it even legitimate to pretend that brotherhood is driven by such a common goal and/or that the men in power/the ruling class do have such common goal/vision? Like for sure, capitalists work together to maintain capitalism, but in the end, isn’t selfishness the ultimate motive?

But yeah, parts of me want to investigate more the ‘‘what would happen to men if matriarchy would make a come back’’, but it seems like I’ll fall into very biased hypothesis. Like, deep down, I just feel like saying that everything will be 100% fine and better. Namely because the masculine, which is the driving force right now, can only incarnate through the archetype of the father (or almost), which can be loving, but is mainly authoritative, therefore somewhat sterile. Since the woman comes into at least three archetypes, the virgin, the mother and the crone, I feel like ‘‘men can find what they need’’ there, like there is some variety for their psyche (ouf, to be deepened).

And then other questions, somewhat unrelated, but I was wondering if toxic masculinity and toxic femininity found their root in the same cause. I was also wondering if monogamy was the main cause of unhealthy gender roles today (like, what if society always had been polyamorous?) To be explored.