LURCHING THROUGH THE DIGI-VERSE

Lurching Through the Digi-Verse

Three techno-artistic fantasies

Every object is embedded in a socio-historical matrix that points toward the future. Technologies’ fraying threads—discourses, materials, fantasies—contain and gesture at potentialities. Here, I present a possible critical framework for three art pieces, and follow it by constructing a world knotted together with some of the threads within and around these objects.

This narrative triptych contains three separate worlds that explore the potential futures of a different technological art object. Each of these worlds is partial, subjective, a flash of possibility filled with as much myth, substance, and (mis)use as the artworks that inspired them. The first passage of each section is a suggested lens through which to view the second (and every fiction piece below)—neither rose-colored glasses nor transparent, but a shade pushing toward liberation.

1. Virtual Bodies, Digital Speech

WarNymph is singer-songwriter Grimes’ digital pop star protégé, a virtual avatar created “from a pixel DNA of [Grimes], the organic human.” Grimes calls this avatar a tool for “techno-feminism,” letting her unwind while WarNymph does interviews, album promo, and glossy collaborations with Balenciaga, Spotify, and NFT platform Nifty. However, this avatar ‘feminism’ falls into the exclusionary, girlboss neoliberalism trap because of its inaccessible construction of the woman—not everyone has a marketing team to manage their virtual selves. This specific iteration of avatar-creation seems to prioritize pixels-per-square inch over artistic innovation, and proffers little more than a flat, aestheticized politics, a future of techno-angels ruling a post-apocalyptic digital wasteland. However, virtual bodies might have uses outside PR stunts.

French philosopher Jacques Rancière defines politics as the policing of the sensible, the “delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise.” Here, communication becomes the locus of the political. Today Silicon Valley and their plutocratic funders seem to be at the switchboard of the sensible, with massive censorship and promotion algorithms that have significant political influence. However, techno-utopic visions coming from these very companies argue that virtual embodiment could instrumentalize the connective power of the internet to usher in a rejuvenation of the public sphere. For example, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta argues its metaverse “enables everyone to participate in new ways,” creating a technocratic commons that will allow new forms of equality and access.

However, central to Rancièrian politics is a distinction between presence and legibility. It is not enough to simply be there—to gain real political power and liberation, one must pass from noise to speech. Any social media user can tell you this: being on Instagram is little more than being a consumer of recycled reels and targeted advertising, distinctly different from having the followers and influence to turn your noise (posts seen by dozens) into speech (brand deals and viral content). In fact, minoritarian presence can be valued even in undemocratic systems; noise is the background to the foreground of speech, as followers are to influencers. The question is not simply whether virtual bodies can allow expanded presence, but whether this presence is routed to a furthering of inequality and apolitical spectacle, or something far more radical.

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She wasn’t sure what felt real anymore—sure, when she woke up, she woke up in her filthy corrugated sheet metal apartment, more container than home, but all that faded away when she logged into the digital world. Here, she could wear whatever she wanted, change her voice; hell, she could escape corporeal form entirely and interact as a wisp of smoke. The seemingly infinite variety of forms, scattered around her in the stadium seats of the people’s assembly, made her feel less self-conscious— subsumed and held by a singular plane of difference—even while surrounded by so many eyes.

If she didn’t engage them in conversation, the faces around her flickered in and out of existence every few minutes, constantly reminding her of the hundreds of millions of people who were loading into this assembly meeting. They had even begun to implement the five-sense engine, spraying scented water into her apartment to simulate a crowded assembly hall. She tended to leave that setting off. Before, she could have never afforded a headset that could support this number of avatars, but after the government took over the digi-verse and sent everyone over the age of 16 the newest model, she reveled in the high definition, loading into each digi-national park, roaming around subsidized artists’ playgrounds.

While these simulations had started as federal projects to reinvest in the arts, political parties quickly caught on to their potential and began to create elaborate party offices filled with renderings from the trendiest contemporary architects. Massive meetings and rallies were held in these surreal environments—she remembered a farmers’ lobby press conference where the speakers had transmogrified themselves into gleaming rods of wheat, then slowly wilted into flaccid, rotten mush as they described the consequences of proposed tax hikes.

Elaborate performance art was more the exception than the norm—most often politicians turned gatherings into an EDM lightshow with the melodrama of a Greek tragedy, apocalyptic visions of an unjust, crumbling world playing over attacks on opposition policy and saccharine house piano melodies accompanying the announcement of a glossy new space station. Sometimes she and her friends would make biting parodies of these productions, slapping politicians’ faces onto every object in a massive mansion or turning a particularly volatile speech into a kabuki show, which they spread around their housing complex on a slim, unlabeled USB.

She excitedly thrust her hand into the air when the colossal green YES materialized in front of her. This was the much-anticipated flat wealth tax, which promised every member of the assembly an extra $250 a month. These were the types of mega-populist policies that reached enough consensus to pass. She had tried to engage with some of the less-attended forums, like ones on church funding and private schools, and even chatted with the required random sample of participants, but found her head spinning in the specificity. The local vernaculars, technical specifics, and seemingly endless lists of stakeholders started to blur into an indistinct mass in her mind. She relished the opportunity that the digi-verse gave her to explore music videos from India and political speeches from New Zealand and minigames from the Netherlands, but more often than not, she ended up headed to her local Midwest animal fair, showing off her new digi-plant creations. Her latest creation was a corn cereal that was pre-soaked with sugar milk in the seed husk.

2. Biophilic Circuitboards

In Adham Faramawy’s My fingers distended as honey dripped from your lips and we danced in a circular motion, a rotating cast of people flail, shudder, and bounce in a green-tinged room on 360° immersive video, with squishy club beats and the sounds of dripping water soundtracking. Animated mushrooms sprout out of the wall and mold spreads across the screen. Faramawy utilizes the trendiest mycelial language, presenting these spores as symbols of non-linear connection, decentralized organization, queerness, and alterity. In this piece, the combination of solo and duet dances with a multitude of partners, inspired by promiscuous fungal bonds, is meant to embrace queer desire in the face of what his promotional materials call “the historic form of the duet, [which] produces and reinforces rigid gender roles.”

Mushrooms are in—from the careful anthropological work of Anna Tsing in Mushroom at the End of the World to the mom-favorite Entangled Life by Meldrin Sheldrake to the cartoonish designs on Urban Outfitters bucket hats, the radical, non-hierarchical, non-linear possibilities of fungi seem to shine in comparison to fascist cornfields. As many in the fast-growing field of radical mycology write, mushrooms are a glowing example of mutual aid. And there are serious historical, material backings to this contradistinction; as Silvia Federici has explored, mushrooms and other foraged goods were central to eking out a non-capitalist life during the expansion of capitalism, which involved the capture of the commons in rigid, fenced-in fields of crops.

However, sometimes the spores might be clouding our vision. Flexibility and openness to surprising connections are certainly key to effective organizing. But if there’s anything that the fast-but-quick burn of the anti-globalization Occupy movement and a decade of internet ‘activism’ has shown, it’s that a flat rejection of hierarchy is often antithetical to any sort of power-building. The increasingly decentralized explosions of protest in the last decade drew massive crowds and instantaneous power from their lack of hierarchy, but were missing the sort of structure and organization that helped the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other civil rights groups build and sustain power from protests. In the face of brutally unequal capitalism, a subversive presentation of fungi is deeply alluring. However, its metaphoric weight can sometimes hinder critical engagement with the radical ethics we project onto mushrooms, and the political economy underneath the mythos.

Faramawy has received funding and assistance from tech companies and VR boosters such as HTC, Fusion Works, and Cambridge Consulting. While any digital media project of this scale using expensive 360° video technology and lots of animation is going to require creative funding approaches, the ‘homophilic’ fungal packaging of his video overshadows any critique of the political economy of hype tech projects. This falls into a long lineage of corporate techno-utopic visions grounded in folksy naturalist language—when the California countercultural back-to-the-land communalists of the 1960s and ‘70s reached middle age, they joined forces with Silicon Valley to imbue emerging communication technology with an endless supply of hip, faux-subversive biological language: immanent planetary ecology, man-computer symbiosis, coevolution.

Stewart Brand, a post-war writer, scientist, and communalist, advertised new tech wrapped in discourses of ecological systems theory, decentralization, and personal liberation in his Whole Earth Catalog—shrouding the rise of corporate libertarians like Newt Gingrich and other California conservatives in counter-cultural naturalism. Faramawy’s embrace of HTC’s VR technology continues this precedent by refusing to engage in the political economy of Big Tech. In 2018, Taiwanese labor rights organization Serve the People Association alleged that HTC committed legal and contractual infractions: deducting worker pay illegally, laying off workers without warning, and even seizing personal property. This adds to a long history of tech labor exploitation, particularly of migrant workers.

While mushrooms are not to blame for techno-capitalism, when Silicon Valley presents immersive technologies as radical worldbuilding, dressing its circuitry in the language of queer dance and earthy mycology, anti-worker, anti-environment stances can become woven into the mycorrhizal network. While there’s a limit to the ability of one artist or piece to critically engage with every injustice of contemporary capitalism, it’s important we don’t let a fungal façade represent liberation.

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She wasn’t quite sure what a mushroom orgy entailed, but she saw “biophilia” splashed across every sensorial billboard, the mildewy stench dripping off the ultra-high definition pixelated fungal perfume advert, and figured she could use a little earth in her life. She used to love her local 4-H, but as the city folk began to take home every blue ribbon with their boutique black raspberry milk hybrid breeds, she figured it was time to turn away from the manure and toward the bio textbook. She didn’t hate her job at the arboretum, but she did expect a few more greenhouses and less lab coats and gene splicing. Since when did server-style plant banks—huge robotic shelves of seedlings in vast warehouses—go from the exception to the norm? But here she was, ready to dig her nails into the dirt, and maybe into some flesh too, and remember what it was to be human.

As she walked into the cavern, after filling out a litany of biometric consent and liability forms, she felt that strange prickle on the back of the neck that comes with entering a space that is trying too hard to look natural—the architectural uncanny valley. Then the smell hit her. In the middle of this plaster cave, a pungent powder-white steam seeped out of a giant fluorescent purple mushroom cap and a knotty mix of musk, dank soil, and what seemed to be a kale-sandalwood infusion hung in the air. Scattered around the dripping grotto walls, dozens of couples, trios, groups too entwined to individuate, and an occasional bashful solo traveler, all grinded against plant-themed sex toys, the giant central spore, and each other. She walked up to a particularly alluring root and gave it a squeeze, recoiling slightly at the bipartite construction, a spongy spray-painted layer giving way to a solid, smooth plastic interior.

As she walked around the outside of space, trying to stay in the shadows to best orient herself, she noticed. a flash in the indent of a soaked stucco wall. She walked up to it and peered through a crack, where she saw a whirring network of wires, flashing red lights, and fans set at full blast, hurriedly pushing back the encroaching moistness and drowning out the cave dwellers' grunts. As she looked up, she could just make out what looked like a control room, and industrial balcony with a few headset-and-visor-clad people with clipboards clustering around a wall of computer monitors. Peering around the massive warehouse, she noticed a thin line of moss snaking across the mottled cement floor. Slipping through the crack, her eyes adjusting to the dim space, she started to follow the moss, watching it spread outwards like a patchwork carpet. A dewy vine crawled up the shuttered windows, wrapping itself around the scaffolding that held up the massive drywall terrarium at the center of the room. On the outside of this massive sphere she could make out what looked like colonies of barnacles, soaking in the condensation of the fog machines and ACs.

Up on the balcony, she saw a lone man wearing a duct-taped gas mask scrub at a set of gears encrusted with mud and roots, which seemed to power the swaying plastic plants back inside the dome. Moving closer, she stepped into a shower of dirt and plant matter barely visible in the murky lot, wafting down from the futile work of the janitor, who clearly needed about ten times the labor power working alongside him. Maybe the venue could have afforded that if the proprietors hadn't given out so many 70-percent-off Groupon deals.

She backed up from the dank loft, heels punching little holes through the lichen-floor, and pushed her way back into the mushroom heaven. Glancing around the room, her eyes fell upon a throuple clustered around an undulating weeping willow. She pushed through the branches and towards the trunk.

3. Technology and the ‘Human Strike’

Claire Fontaine is a conceptual artist created by Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill, who are her ‘assistants,’ making the art pieces but eschewing identification as the artist—both a bold ploy for attention and a dig at the exploitation and absurdity of flashy contemporary artists’ use of underpaid assistants. Fontaine presents herself as a sinkhole of subjectivity, a “human strike” against the roles and requirements of capital, whether that’s being a woman, a worker, or simply a sovereign subject.

Coming out of feminist interpretations of Italian autonomous Marxism—a movement that emerged in the 1960s and emphasizes self-organized, bottom-up worker resistance in all aspects of life—Fontaine is a reaction to the ways capital infiltrates our lives outside of the workplace, from unpaid feminized housework to the commodification of social interaction exemplified by networking. Fontaine presents the readymade as an artistic intervention in this political morass.

The readymade is an artistic technique popularized by French artist Marcel DuChamp, where ‘ordinary’ manufactured objects are turned into art pieces solely through the agency of the artist—choosing, titling, signing, and showing the work. Fontaine gestures towards the readymade in both her work and her name. She creates neon signs proclaiming that “Beauty is a Readymade” and a series where the actual covers of classic texts are stretched around bricks; her artistic persona is appropriated from the French stationery company Clairefontaine, an exemplar of mass-produced capitalist manufacturing.

Because there is no Claire Fontaine beyond the shifting, implacable idea of a Claire Fontaine, she is the readymade taken to the extreme, the gesture and nothing else, no material, no use-value, and, therefore, nothing to be taken up and co-opted by capital. In the best case, the readymade can reorient towards production processes and be a critique of capitalism’s elision of use-value through exemplifying the absurdity of exchange-value, valuation based solely on the market. However, Fontaine’s attempt to twist the readymade into a shape that can respond to contemporary capitalism— heavily theorized, high-profile contemporary art—might reveal the limits of art as revolution.

As a rejection of capitalist identity, Fontaine is an attempt at a temporary autonomous zone (TAZ) of personhood—a delimited space of escape. Anarchist Hakim Bey theorized the TAZ in 1991, arguing that instead of a cycle of “revolution”—waiting for the perfect time to revolt, just to fall back to the state—radical action should include the nurturing of TAZs: spaces, times, or ‘imaginaries’ which don’t directly engage with the state but instead evade it. Fontaine engages in a similar politics of invisibility, a refusal to normatively engage with artistic and political institutions—attempting to reject the art world’s economy of networking, presence, and gendered, raced synecdoche or stereotype.

Bey is particularly entranced by the illegal, subversive communication on the internet, the ways that TAZs can be cultivated through data compilation, peer to peer file sharing, and piracy—technologies which can make up for temporary-ness of TAZs through efficiency and compaction. Here, he contends that taking and appropriating specific technologies and techniques is necessary for political change—from flyering to Signal chats, technology accomplishes clear-cut goals and provides the material chassis for revolution, inspiring and embodying new worlds.

In the early 1900s, Duchamp’s appropriation of consumer goods functioned as a passionate defense of individual craftwork in the face of industrial capitalism. In 2022, low-paid, precarious Etsy shops, influencer-entrepreneurs, and gig workers reflect a world in which handmade, individual labor and authorial ownership is just as volatile and exploitational as any factory floor. Fontaine’s critique attempts pure refusal, a subjective void within capitalism, so that even one’s identity can’t be appropriated by capital. Yet puzzling decisions, such as collaborating with Dior on a runway show and trite, symbolic institutional critique (a neon STRIKE sign in the window of the Tate Modern), compromise her political economic critique and allow sparkling institutions to take on the illusory sheen of radical politics without material transformation. While Fontaine writes that “art should perform an interruption of the usual perception,” radical messaging fêted by luxury fashion houses and Sackler-Bezos funded museums is more the norm than the exception these days.

Yes, there is no outside to contemporary global capitalism, but one of the central roles of a revolutionary artist-thinker is to identify what technologies created by capital can be re-appropriated for resistance. Hakim Bey identified the less-regulated underbelly of cyberspace in the ‘90s, while Fontaine seems to pinpoint symbolic critique and de-subjectification that does little to unsettle the glossy urban centers it’s shown in. What would it look like to occupy and challenge these centers of capital in a more material way?

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When she pressed enter, she heard the icy hum of electronics stutter and drop for a millisecond, then whir back up, returning with a quiet ticking overlaying the dripping of coolant streaming through the walls around her. She pressed her keyboard again, sending a precise geo-location that traveled from her overheated laptop to a wire-clad smartphone in their collectively maintained server. As long as it kept ticking, they were protected—not so much off the grid as on it, perched on the scaffolding trying not to make a sound. In minutes, people started to show up, ducking under the curtain that led to the outside. They met in a different gleaming conference room every week, splicing videos of an empty room into the video feeds and carefully shifting each scheduled meeting to another open room. Smartly clad in ironed suits and conservative skirts, they looked like any other business meeting droning on in the office park, visible through the barely frosted cubicle glass.

She pulled up an intricate 3-D rendering on the massive, interactive screen, sipping a cappuccino from the break room. Pictured was a glistening skyscraper, with an ornate bar and steakhouse on the first floor, and three layers of pool and spa equipment. She overlaid this schematic with an undulating green haze that ran up and down the entire building, shifting position and shape as simulated new tenants, exterminators, realtors, and supers strolled around the floors. Every couple levels, an entire floor would glow electric green, throbbing in time with the ticking that vibrated around the conference table—an extended elevator shaft, a servants’ quarters, the 13th floor, a kitchen sub-basement. In this conference room they mapped out their commune. From the pool they would filter water, from the restaurant they would serve food, from the spas they would administer medicine, from the bar they would prove that revolutionary life didn’t have to be austere.

The very precarity of their home upheld their political purity—constantly evading capture and discovery by the real tenants and owners of the high-rise meant that the bed you slept in one night might be filled by an ogligarch the next, making the concept of private property impossible. Consumption was also tightly controlled, skimming off the top of tenants’ grocery orders and diverting choice items from the trash chute for early-morning undercover cooking sessions. Without massive storehouses and walk-in freezers, food must be distributed and eaten as quickly as possible, with sustenance as the only goal.

However, liminal need not mean precarious: their easy attitudes and elaborate notes projected confidence as they carefully discussed graphics and contingency plans, tapping away at expensive built-in workstations. In a folder hidden on one of their computers was a chunky, pixelated rendering, another shifting green map, a cartography of the resistance, but unlike the other ones, this one was moving across an entire city, holding blocks at a time. Instead of furtive strikes into storerooms and tense nights sharing stolen beds, this model included organized work teams marching in lockstep to massive horticultural warehouses, manufacturing assault rifles, and making massive batches of medicine. Further, this model didn’t remain locked at a certain square footage, loop around showing the same infinite permutations of the green haze at a specific size—it expanded and kept on expanding, slowly but surely painting the city with a bright green glow until it stopped at the edges of the frame, humming with intensity until the screen faded to black.

They hadn’t yet simulated what came next.

KOLYA SHIELDS B’24 pronounces biennale incorrectly.