https://xenofuturismmagazine.com xenofuturism Sat, 07 Dec 2024 14:53:46 +0000 https://xenofuturismmagazine.com en https://xenofuturismmagazine.com/Home Sat, 19 Jun 2021 16:12:42 +0000 xenofuturism https://xenofuturismmagazine.com/Home Our Publication Xeno Futurism is an independent critical theory journal that analyses 21st century issues from abstract perspectives &amp; amplifies voices from the margins, unfolding into speculative (xeno) futures. Each issue is inspired by pivotal thinkers, ideologies or movements.&nbsp; &nbsp; <img width="5129" height="3630" width_o="5129" height_o="3630" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/02d640f205bd504c286520dc3aa71925c1082c0f8c82966ffbf602d7f1502784/img20250623_15104358.jpg" data-mid="238377688" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/02d640f205bd504c286520dc3aa71925c1082c0f8c82966ffbf602d7f1502784/img20250623_15104358.jpg" /> <img width="2903" height="3629" width_o="2903" height_o="3629" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/90f576eef6fca8fe42a095224f15085308828b95acf3956e50daac5021cad1ef/IMG_8582-2.JPG" data-mid="238377379" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/90f576eef6fca8fe42a095224f15085308828b95acf3956e50daac5021cad1ef/IMG_8582-2.JPG" /> <img width="2423" height="3029" width_o="2423" height_o="3029" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/155021040016a66e1f3d893eddcdf8e1a0291fe912fef5c1c5d5129194e20d1d/IMG_5595.jpg" data-mid="238377359" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/155021040016a66e1f3d893eddcdf8e1a0291fe912fef5c1c5d5129194e20d1d/IMG_5595.jpg" /> <img width="4229" height="3172" width_o="4229" height_o="3172" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/42f5f849de5b793396c878cd16a6989ecfeccd1badead57bc3e4478ee91f22f8/IMG_5634-2.jpg" data-mid="238377363" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/42f5f849de5b793396c878cd16a6989ecfeccd1badead57bc3e4478ee91f22f8/IMG_5634-2.jpg" /> <img width="3268" height="2614" width_o="3268" height_o="2614" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/87b42b79e6545b191ca5baed682ef9ff62587828693cc2a00e211db12483979d/IMG_5652-2.jpg" data-mid="238377367" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/87b42b79e6545b191ca5baed682ef9ff62587828693cc2a00e211db12483979d/IMG_5652-2.jpg" /> <img width="5712" height="4284" width_o="5712" height_o="4284" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/46229d4b5a725b93aa6d3c98f4ca0975108716e121ce731fbc94e02e7ed01d6a/IMG_5613-2.jpg" data-mid="238377360" border="0" data-scale="61" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/46229d4b5a725b93aa6d3c98f4ca0975108716e121ce731fbc94e02e7ed01d6a/IMG_5613-2.jpg" /> <img width="3292" height="4190" width_o="3292" height_o="4190" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d844eb703a600d8126000ac16b6b62c63627194340a86885e0830ca1fa7fa4c5/IMG_5676.jpg" data-mid="238377717" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d844eb703a600d8126000ac16b6b62c63627194340a86885e0830ca1fa7fa4c5/IMG_5676.jpg" /> <img width="5712" height="4284" width_o="5712" height_o="4284" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d9decb12e334f0ff2b18f94b1ae2d41099588d03d797c421d48afdb819653875/IMG_5623-2.jpg" data-mid="238377361" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d9decb12e334f0ff2b18f94b1ae2d41099588d03d797c421d48afdb819653875/IMG_5623-2.jpg" /> <img width="2932" height="2346" width_o="2932" height_o="2346" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3c91c860ae809b57457cdd6b0c0fdd08c8552373756b107817d9dcd93d0e9b3a/IMG_5660-2.jpg" data-mid="238377369" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3c91c860ae809b57457cdd6b0c0fdd08c8552373756b107817d9dcd93d0e9b3a/IMG_5660-2.jpg" /> &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;︎ISSUE 2:TECHNOLOGIES OF DOMINATION <img width="2614" height="2614" width_o="2614" height_o="2614" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/654ea25c1d9086359a0730c1be6f69db1b2ac8452d3250095bfc0f754bebf42c/IMG_4517.jpg" data-mid="228718653" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/654ea25c1d9086359a0730c1be6f69db1b2ac8452d3250095bfc0f754bebf42c/IMG_4517.jpg" /> <img width="2798" height="2798" width_o="2798" height_o="2798" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/dd7a91706fec6b3ce58ab965f0815ecbbcba9d14ac0f206da9b6e8920f028d16/IMG_4528.jpg" data-mid="228718652" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/dd7a91706fec6b3ce58ab965f0815ecbbcba9d14ac0f206da9b6e8920f028d16/IMG_4528.jpg" /> <img width="1170" height="1171" width_o="1170" height_o="1171" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4f9bd014b3643cffd0667f933a3f18bae53e03107c034dc4a7cb141d7a39ad3d/IMG_3063.jpg" data-mid="228719153" border="0" alt="ISSUE 1: Postmodernism &amp; Identiy" data-caption="ISSUE 1: Postmodernism &amp; Identiy" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4f9bd014b3643cffd0667f933a3f18bae53e03107c034dc4a7cb141d7a39ad3d/IMG_3063.jpg" /> FEATURES https://xenofuturismmagazine.com/Essay-Where-is-the-Post-Soviet-in-the-Post-of-Post-Colonial Wed, 12 Jul 2023 05:33:00 +0000 xenofuturism https://xenofuturismmagazine.com/Essay-Where-is-the-Post-Soviet-in-the-Post-of-Post-Colonial Where is the Post-Soviet in the “Post” of Post-Colonial? - Anna Englehart <img src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXdRJNrLxkupbPzfdSn1-_QHHvrpXkwzAyEXMv091UDWMnKYTGY81gGbZFi8GKcvxp8GG9Urdya4-GdsWi_4nMUs2s-Njj0nGXYSQYhiBbukPHQ0T_ugTny9bJaeFQuK04_ZLmBuwTysxkWwxqxQYHEmpFyb9GYmOR--cJxx0SHcLFoa07MN-xY?key=szqtimSZzhELPQj7INm_rg" width="602" height="339" style="width: 602px; height: 339px;"> Where in the frictions of post-colonial identity lies post-Soviet space? Can post-colonial and decolonial approaches help to account for histories of Russian colonialism and futures of its decolonisation? Excerpt from the article originally published in Strelka Mag, New Urban Conditions Post-colonial theory and Russia have existed for a long time as two almost parallel universes. Even though there were researchers in the post-Soviet space who were tackling post-colonial problematics—Ihar Babkov, a post-colonial scholar from Belarus, and Oksana Zabuzhko, a Ukrainian feminist writer, to name a few—Russian academia was successfully rejecting the mere possibility of questioning the status quo. Marko Pavlyshyn, a rare example of the earliest attempts (1992) of a Ukrainian-Australian scholar to start the conversation, was “ignored or ridiculed by the overwhelming majority” of researchers both from Russia and the West, according to Ukrainian post-colonial scholar Vitaly Chernetsky. If post-colonial work originating in the post-Soviet space could be silenced easily, post-colonial theory coming from the West was too trendy to be totally disregarded. In his article “On Some Post-Soviet post-colonialisms” Chernetsky shows how in the 1990s Russian intellectuals conferred various euphemisms to central figures of post-colonial theory to disguise their connection to post-colonialism itself. One instance is how seminal post-colonial thinkers such as Edward Said, whose book Orientalism became the foundational text for post-colonial theory, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose Can the Subaltern Speak? is the opening text for any post-colonial reader, were presented in Russia. In 1998, philologist Ilya Ilyin described them as a “well-known literary scholar of a leftist-anarchist orientation” and a “socially engaged feminist deconstructionist,” respectively. Such “strategic appropriation of post-colonial discourse,” as Chernetsky put it in 2006, hasn’t been radically questioned since then.It is important to note at the same time that to transpose post-colonial theory on post-Soviet space is not a solution of any kind. The conversation that was started by US scholar David Chioni Moore in 2001 with the key article “Is the Post- in Post-Colonial the Post- in Post-Soviet?” made very clear the impossibility of taking any shortcuts when it comes to the topic of decolonization in post-Soviet space. Moore, Spivak, Ram, Tlostanova, and Chernetsky formulate the continuity of the argument that warns against the direct substitution of “post” in “post-Soviet” by “post” in “post-colonial.” Post-colonial theory has almost nothing to say about the Second World—it was born in the struggle of the Second World against colonization by the First World—or in new-old terms, the Global South against the Global North. Its analytical tools cannot be used as universally applicable, as they were not meant to be universal in the first place. Post-colonial studies perpetuated the exclusion of the Second World, navigating through three main “post-” subjects. Madina Tlostanova, a notable decolonial scholar from the south of Russia, describes it like this in her 2011 article “The South of the Poor North”: The “post” in “post-modernism” signifies the First World, and the “post” in “post-colonialism” the Third World. Meanwhile, the Second World is left with the “post” in “post-communism.” What might be the place of post-communism in the colonial North-South divide? Instead of viewing the North and the South as homogeneous spaces, Tlostanova proposes a new complexity in the division. She offers the notion of differences—colonial and imperial ones. <img src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXdM1wrA4JjCIAZvv-gdp8P60vGOprwMR4RWEuxK9FJelT6z487eA9em2ulz6t31Q0IDhRP4CZwuJKTJAxfmRGW-rPo1WY442P0dwT-UeMQr3rx7n7eQzxjkdJ32XtHMn-PZIwjjAxYyXrmFpSF4sFu4megMxTWs2P1goXo8iqllGdPeSOIaX0w?key=szqtimSZzhELPQj7INm_rg" width="602" height="339" style="width: 602px; height: 339px;"> Colonial difference substitutes the conventional division between the North and the South—an example would be the British Empire and India, which has been thoroughly reviewed by post-colonial studies and its subaltern strand as one of the most influential subdivisions. The imperial difference sheds light on the distinction between the roles that different empires play in colonial relations. The imperial difference can be internal—such as the division between the North and South of Europe—and external. The external imperial difference goes between the First World and Second World empires. Russia, being part of the Second World, has always been the outsider of the First World or the “rich North,” as Tlostanova puts it. “Russia has never been seen by Western Europe as its part, remaining a racialized empire, which feels itself a colony in the presence of the West and projects its own inferiority complexes onto its colonies, particularly Muslim ones, which today have become precisely the South of the poor North,” she writes. Tlostanova provides a fundamentally different view on the way Russian colonialism functions. In The Darker Side of Modernity, Walter Mignolo—one of the core Latin American decolonial thinkers—speaks of coloniality as the dark side of Western modernity which is inseparable from the whole. Enriched by Tlostanova’s analysis that the South produced by the poor North has no direct connection to Western modernity—versus the South of the Rich North that is connected even against its own will—this thesis leads to a conclusion that the space colonized by Russia is even darker than the darker side portrayed by Mignolo. Being considerate of imperial and colonial differences one must learn with, not from, post-colonial theory. Instead of using post-colonial theory as the only valid reference point, post-colonialism is productive as part of the more substantial project of decolonization that mindfully points towards imperial similarities. Tlostanova points out these similarities: even though the Russian/Soviet empire aimed to position itself as an independent alternative to the West’s modernization through the Bolshevik experiment, the Soviet model was inseparable from it. Therefore, a post-colonial critique of Western imperialism must be treated as a tradition on which we can act to produce our heterogenous reflections. Post-colonialism is a struggle that doesn’t have ready answers, but which might inspire how we can search for them. One of the points from post-colonial theory that resonates with post-Soviet space questions the limits of the “post-Soviet” or “post-communist” itself. Arjun Appadurai, a post-colonial scholar of globalization, who is of Indian origin, outlines the West’s “endless preoccupation” with itself. Chernetsky adds to Appadurai’s statement: “whether positive or negative value judgments are attached,” meaning that Western scholars tend to either praise the West or criticize it, but never speak about other geographies and contexts—so the West will always remain the centre of attention. Looking at Soviet modernization and its consequences, we see a similar preoccupation. “Many memoirs and accounts have been produced since the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, and mine wants simply to ask the question ‘where are we now, after 23 years?’” Agata Pyzik, a cultural critic from Poland, states in her 2014 book Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West. “If the Soviet Union 23 years into its existence wasn’t called post-tsarist, why are we still defined as “post-communist,” and why is it relevant? Did history take a slower pace, or was it finished, as Fukuyama said, after 1989?” How can we call our ongoing future that starts with the decolonial resistance rather than monstrous regimes of state violence? https://xenofuturismmagazine.com/Interview-Getting-Personal-with-Peggy-Huang-and-a-conversation-on Sun, 14 Jan 2024 13:57:15 +0000 xenofuturism https://xenofuturismmagazine.com/Interview-Getting-Personal-with-Peggy-Huang-and-a-conversation-on Getting Personal with Peggy Huang; and a conversation on “Proper Asian Wife in Training – Volume 1” <img src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXfC9aaozJZg8OLdfpmZfUuJYk4Km4TW3296B81tvKA-JA_53Z3Hy4_RoMjfsufkwGuLVX6Atd_A6vaaAk9OUDaVup4_77zNhtSih3FslV6_ZlEZv7Vv4YQH8deYNpPLPeFnxx0aPcE6BwZfAiZG9bL6LNj8LnOPv7Bd7GkjQt0OBS2IjC2mY8U?key=B4FHprRrhB5W9MZzAPORJw" width="601" height="339" style="width: 601px; height: 339px;"> In conversation with Peggy Huang 1.Could you tell us a little about “Proper Asian wife in training - volume I”, which is part of the “Proper Asian wife in training (完美人妻養成計劃 ).” project? Proper Asian wife in training is an experimental video piece I created in the summer of June 2020, it’s an exploration of my personal identity as a contemporary Taiwanese woman I pondered over questions like who am I? Who do I want to become? After living in London for 3 years, it really helped me push myself towards deciding who I wanted to be – to think and challenge myself in part of a self-healing process. I then came up with "Proper Asian wife in training”, it’s a coming-out piece as a 'rebel'. It was a challenge. I wanted to push my boundaries to see what I could produce that comes from a place of my duality. I wanted to embrace my cultural self and upbringing (Taiwanese traditional rules) also finding the balance between these rules and the more contemporary self (perhaps the more western influenced one). <img src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXfgLtVSsRa7ySjafpvJ8OOz2IhAhcXvhdRBJR7LlsC9YuJu-lnGQTMIPZbtlQrbHZYiE9drkt6ZxoRTjpzQYg926tpUiMv5yiGrIUQDXyWFuiYAHMSYt5DTPQpxw9oVUr3005z2bpjA82C2RcrxZILgqhBbFT8fC07BsmvM4MUKEF9V5i6BXA?key=B4FHprRrhB5W9MZzAPORJw" width="601" height="339" style="width: 601px; height: 339px;"> 2. In your experimental piece, you naturally drift into different conversational topics such as “self-love or nursing your body”, “your fathers dream” and “marrying a good guy” all of these are discussed whilst tattooing yourself, what is this meant to portray?There’s this ancient Chinese saying that is still rooted in my culture: “身體髮膚受之父母，不敢毀傷，孝之始也” It translates to “your skin is given to you by your parents, so you should do everything you can to protect it, and not injure or wound it.” This is the starting point of being a good son/daughter, now if we apply this on the idea of tattooing... stabbing one’s skin with ink leaving ‘scars’, it’s a mega rebellious action to commit. However, acupuncture, also something super traditional, heals patients by inserting needles into skin. Tattoo and acupuncture both practice penetrating the skin with thin, solid, metallic needles but are being tagged with a complete opposite attitude. If linking the two together, tattooing can be a therapeutic practice too? With tattoos, it’s never about which flash I ended up choosing, but more of trying to record that period of lifetime. It’s like listening to songs, certain songs that bring you back to specific times in the past. I felt that with tattoos. It’s quite awkward, to talk about my honest feelings to my parents, so then having new tattoos is really a ‘right in the face’ way to push new boundaries between me and my parents, a way to redefine who I am to them, and to ‘come-out’ in loud silence. Lowkey therapeutic… also, I just really enjoy having tattoos. <img src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXcehiBNlZGdthzNLqflca9oGHgFwZ_wWXUa6FpufFH9LkYBjk0rprnbAQkevewPB9zF9UwdLmjfhg0EtCUdm_u2OXeqlo-cFz9WMT2QO5SJFaLAW8JdXOzn_pkXz6CPld5tG_QpKEfCGyDvBWUjphwmOF6B3o0YQ_Z_5uNHOQ-zC38zmq_6Yw4?key=B4FHprRrhB5W9MZzAPORJw" width="601" height="339" style="width: 601px; height: 339px;"> 3. A re-occurring theme explored in the piece was familial expectations, is this something you feel is a struggle for you? The idea of family values is strong in East Asian culture. I think the struggle for me is trying to find the right balance in meeting both my own expectations for myself and my parents’ expectations for me too.&nbsp; One expectation I give myself is to be a ‘good daughter’ in return to all the unconditional love my parents have given and still are giving to me… and so there’s this impending pressure I feel, almost like an obligation that family comes first but this is in battle with the question “who am I?’ I suppose there’s a lot here I’m trying to learn and unlearn. <img src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXdXYpNjY8C8H-o7GxBViWXzcMNbGo_TIXy8LHPx7JabPWih2WcanhXizpzxOFqkc18sI1Q__OGzY6ArXqH7ZmDSm9x0vb0aK8RbxjmtsRmwxFpX7sLDitO4IL1a7Mr_Am8ef8Ob68HjeDbMx0P8HKBR0U7HL4UnTTOoqn3EqVNkKtEaOfAzEw?key=B4FHprRrhB5W9MZzAPORJw" width="601" height="339" style="width: 601px; height: 339px;"> 4. Your relationship with contemporary art, is it also intertwined with exploring your identity? I’ve found that the contemporary art/fine art mindset is a means of allowing myself to explore my identity in a calm way. It’s not too hardcore but like slow cooking a dish, with time it cooks out the best aspects (like of oneself). With contemporary art there’s always this big direction I’m moving towards but I’m not sure where the destination is. So, then there’s space allowing the unconscious and unknown coming in, I suppose that’s also called opportunity. When new work is completed, it's as if I just woken up from a dream (this can be either good or bad). Looking into your dream and subconscious is the key to understanding your true self or what you’re battling deep inside, with that I get to consciously heal myself by understanding what I’m suppressing. Suppression comes in the package of my upbringing essentially. We were taught to not parade big emotions or least not to burst out in emotion, as it doesn’t reflect ‘maturity’ - I’m trying to unlearn this. I feel like being able to express emotion and be honest with oneself requires strength and that also can be another definition of maturity. <img src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXcNdOw8UWe1SOjGdctY9zR2_x5ksbD7quGEuNIDlw2ZrD5B1wmFBepcCs7EObj2KXK269pWBMY9JyeMGU0sH81NbRiY5I-9BT7shKyUfBgQ6fK8mDWYNhg_ki1fqJIQOXI-llHjPrf-qGcYvGliIsw8m6aAlqrYosw3F6CwawFhKmh5UDtpTSA?key=B4FHprRrhB5W9MZzAPORJw" width="601" height="339" style="width: 601px; height: 339px;"> 5. How do you feel transitioning from an illustrative mindset to a conceptual art one? Bit difficult but also quite liberating actually. A conceptual art mind set is a process of unlearning my habits of running away from my honest thoughts and learning to unbox and make peace with it. It’s a never-ending self-therapy session&nbsp; Illustration/design allows me to be creative without having to dig into my soul. It reflected on who I was and my upbringing. Would say I grew up in a culture where we’re conditioned to suppress our authentic thoughts. Japan colonized Taiwan for 50 years from 1895 to 1945, which was the time my grandparents were raised. Right after that it was the intense 38-year -long martial law period which was the era where my parents grew up. Both generations were not given any space to express their feelings in order to survive. The shared incapability to express is the coping mechanism alongside such a traumatic upbringing. It’s then not a surprise that I’m an expert at unconsciously ignoring my true feelings knowing I was raised by these people lol. I remembered that one time when I was still back in London, my best friend (she’s not Taiwanese) told me that she made her second Taiwanese friend and then she said “I realized that you Taiwanese are very agreeable” . I laughed; I seriously think that is on point. Anyways, what I am trying to say is, Illustration is a reflection of my culture, my people and conceptual art mindset is something I learned in London -- to be free, to touch my honest thoughts.&nbsp; It’s a good balance like yin and yang in tai chi. 6. Identity is a conundrum for many. Did you have any theoretical influences for your work? For sure I would say the work of Edward Said and the ideology behind Orientalism, is so relevant. The battle between east vs west culturally, economically, and socially.&nbsp; Also, Re-Orientalism, I’d say it’s something that I focus on --- Knowing that the impact from colonialism and imperialism is irreversible so how are we redefining our identity as Far East Asian or Taiwanese, this is something that plays a big role on my work. I also think Confucianism, ancient Chinese philosophy which still lives in contemporary East Asian veins, definitely influences my work and is also something I want to challenge.&nbsp; 7. Defining and pin-pointing identity can be difficult in a postmodern era, it’s somewhat a hybrid of so many societal and cultural elements. Postmodernists see identity as “not fixed” but a continual process of negotiating with different parts of yourself. What are your views on this? I quite agree with the term ‘not fixed. 90s kids grew up on the internet, so we already had easy access to other worlds and cultures and quite easily were bombarded with information – in a sense it made me feel like I don’t belong to any culture to some extent. The existence of the virtual world has a huge impact on how one identifies themselves in the 21st century. It’s not as simple as it used to be, such as identifying from where you were born and raised. I wouldn’t consider myself bilingual, I started learning English at the age of 4. My parents spent money sending me to English cram school, hiring native English speakers as my personal tutor just to play and talk to me in English because they think English is the ultimate tool to make me more desirable and hireable in a globalised world. They didn’t realize that might in a way backfire, language is a tool, yes, but it’s also the key to another culture and that adds as a big part to my identity. In a sense it makes it more complicated. At the end of the day, home or what you belong to is where your loved ones are. Perhaps we don’t belong anywhere, we’re all floating. In a postmodern world people belong everywhere. 8. What is next for the ‘Proper Asian wife in training’ series? For the next part for Proper Asian wife in training, I think I’d like to go in depth with Taiwanese elements and explore. About our beliefs or you can say philosophy and food too. Try to dig into the topic of ‘What is Taiwanese? Who are we?’. While also continuing to push and reset the boundaries between tradition and contemporary.&nbsp; The Taiwanese identity is still quite unsettled, it’s something that we are still developing because of our historical background. We are still in the process of defining who we are and that makes it very exciting. <img src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXeoLWisUIYccG5JQghYCuO7snuT4alCZIxJqFCqWcMAJKwJEHIscqyNMydlUYv2E3bT5SEkzwLSR0KJ5ObL8W6oEhMaiOHAoIsKE7ovAH-w41_pygzv0kQ6aQno3I4crHwPpC3Jf0dRw9a9b1I1-6VaxPk7ZWwP9LSakFqYDBxpDz12txjnyg?key=B4FHprRrhB5W9MZzAPORJw" width="601" height="300" style="width: 601px; height: 300px;"> https://xenofuturismmagazine.com/Essay-ENTER-SURVEILLANCE-CAPITALISM-by-Akin-Askinoglu Sun, 14 Jan 2024 14:47:44 +0000 xenofuturism https://xenofuturismmagazine.com/Essay-ENTER-SURVEILLANCE-CAPITALISM-by-Akin-Askinoglu ENTER; SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM by Akin Askinoglu <img src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXc0RIP5yUe7cFkWA148Klfbyc1UERtP6rSgzHZZqqU-zYSPajCTPNqQ0KFz2ENDeCc7_teccKUfhDJrV_qdmbFDCeks8CbiquBKrGiZ_jV1tdfYPYL4ZC5IyQoOuVUxCBourpIcJRKwSTtErw_nCSy7g03--cWz8MdmLc8GhpJ7da3i7APKHc8?key=lYYQXeBiHcSXGdgujpCFDQ" width="601" height="717" style="width: 527.128px; height: 628.87px;" data-scale="83"> ENTER;SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM Glossary: AO : Anti Oedipus (D&amp;G) ATP: A Thousand Plateaus (D&amp;G) SM: Signs and Machines (Lazzarato) SC: Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff) Surveillance capitalism plugs us into its omnipotent extraction architecture without any possibility of logging off. Can we escape the masked machine lurking in the subterrain beneath the ones and zeros? In 1994, Nick Land dubbed Capital as an alien Artificial intelligence coming from the future that is poised to eat your TV, infect your bank account, and hack xenodata from your mitochondria. While today most of these overblown technophilic fictional claims made by the father of accelerationist theory-fiction (with the help of 90s techno-euphoria accompanied by meth abuse) falls flat, it still gives a good idea of the pervasiveness of capitalism in our lives. Our actions, thoughts, and identities produced by our desires in our private, social and work lives are intrinsically linked with the capitalist machine. In “Capitalism and Schizophrenia”, Deleuze and Guattari draw attention to the widespread pathologisation of desire, as well as desire’s revolutionary potential of creating new “lines of flight” which are able to call the status quo of a society into question and at the same time demolish established social sectors (AO, 139). They name the amalgamation of all social and economic relations “the socius'' which are produced through the flows of desire. A flow of desire for example, can be a sexual act or gender expression that, if out of the accepted norm, would have been overcoded and corrected by the despotic state apparatus. Up until the recent past, any deviation from the christian marital norm of a “union between one man and one woman” or deviation from the “biologically” and socially accepted ways of gender expression would have been penalised and the subject would have been tried to be “corrected” through the combination of punishment (castration) and mental asylum imprisonment, as well as being overcoded and inscribed as “mad and perverse”&nbsp; upon the socius (and this still happens in many places around the world). However, the objective of capitalism being capital accumulation, as a system it is tasked with decoding and deterritorialising the flows of our desires, (AO, 47) meaning it accommodates any identity category for the sake of accumulation.The integration of the radical roots of Pride, of queer culture, and identity in general into rainbow capitalism is a prime suspect in this case. Of course you can slap a rainbow on your brand logo, sponsor the Pride Parade, and most of us will eat it up because many of us in developed countries can exist in an assimilated fashion and are spoon fed commodities and content that reinforce our “authenticity” in addition to having historical amnesia. At the end of the day the firms laugh their way to the bank while the anti-capitalist, anti-police and pro-black roots of Pride are buried under a rubble of shattered hopes of liberation. The task of wealth accumulation requires the deterritorialisation of the old socius -&nbsp; that being the dissolution of old social norms, values, religions, traditions and economic relations as Marx famously said in the Communist Manifesto&nbsp; that with the advent of private property and industrial capitalism “all fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, were swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” However the dissolution of the old socius by the capitalist machine into a new dismembered one is not absolute, in fact, there are many reterritorialisations in the various segments and strata of the socius in the form of the state, laws and family structures, and socio-economic phenomena such as racism and fascism which all function and must function as regulators, generators and recorders of the flows of desire within the socius for the proper operation of the capitalist machine. On the one hand, we perceive and experience our own identities and the world from the images and ideas we find around us in our engagement with media, technology,&nbsp; politics and the economy, and on the other hand, we reflect those ideas and images - for some partly, for most entirely - when we express and behave ourselves in regards to our identities and the tools we use, making us a “collective assemblage of enunciation” in the capitalist semiotic operator where there is no longer an identifiable subject (ATP, 144). We are rendered to machine organs in the full body of capital. Nonetheless, being “a machine organ” does not mean you as an individual do not exist, it only means that a subject exists in an assemblage with objects around itself, meaning there is no subject/object binary in the concept of the “machine”. Machines are thus not products of technics but parts of what makes humans humans, or post-humans in this case and they are required as a prior condition to the creation of technics. Lazzarato explains this excellently: “Guattari's machinism does not oppose man and machine, "in order to evaluate the correspondences, the extensions, and possible or impossible substitutions of one for the other," but instead brings them into "communication in order to show how man is a component part of the machine, or combines with something else to constitute a machine. The other thing can be a tool, or even an animal, or other men." ” (SM, 81). The machinism that flows through us is nevertheless a double edged sword as it can be as easily hijacked by cybernetic control mechanisms to integrate human behaviour, health and culture into the functions of the capitalist apparatus, as it can be utilised by us for our own liberation - or so we thought. Now, let's explore how capitalism as a semiotic (visual and signifying) operator produces wealth and points of subjectification through functions that Deleuze and Guattari dub “machinic enslavement” and “social subjection”. Social subjection assigns us with various identity categories such as a nationality, a gender, a profession and more, manufacturing our consciousness, behaviours and representations as “individuated” subjects for the necessary social division of labour in capitalism. Whereas, under the grips of machinic enslavement the individual is not seen as an individuated subject but rather as a functional and operational machine part of the assemblages of finance, politics, media, business and their institutions (schools, internet, television, corporations, etc.). Throw in a dash of state sanctioned user data extraction and Google’s Artificial Intelligence algorithms, and we have the newest kid in the block; Surveillance Capitalism, or as I’d like to call it the surveillance and control stage of capitalism with its almost magical behavioural prediction and manipulation which utilises the twin functions of machinic enslavement and social subjection. So, every bit of our identity, be it private, social, or economic is and can be utilised for capital accumulation with the grace of these twin functions and surveillance capital as its operator. Afterall, “the strength of capitalism resides in the fact that its axiomatic is never saturated, that it is always capable of adding a new axiom to the previous ones.” (AO,&nbsp; 287). The next dish on the menu for capital: you.Shoshanna Zuboff observes a new function of capitalism that has mutated surveillance elements into its DNA - which she calls Surveillance Capitalism. By extracting ‘the human experience’ as a raw material to translate user behavioural data that is collected through our various online engagements with content and is processed by artificial intelligence algorithms, which can then accurately predict our future purchases and content engagement behaviours both online and in real life producing a continuous machinic - and behavioural surplus value. This means that capitalism now anticipates, predicts, and coaxes our behaviours and feelings towards profitable outcomes. So, at the present stage of capitalism both our private and social identities are in the process of being anticipatingly pre-packaged and literally sold to us. Our desires that we deem as our own are in the process of being animated, functionalised and enslaved into the machinic extraction architecture of capital. A new form of capture apparatus unique to surveillance capitalism is looming and it just might be bound to swallow up all the lines of flight necessary for a radical break. “There where the flows are decoded, the specific flows of code that have taken a technical and scientific form are subjected to a properly social axiomatic that is much severer than all the scientific axiomatics: the axiomatic of the world capitalist market.&nbsp; The flows of code that are "liberated" in science and technics by the capitalist regime engender a machinic surplus value that does not directly depend on science and technics themselves, but on capital—a surplus value that is added to human surplus value and that comes to correct the relative diminution of the latter, both constituting the whole of the surplus value of flux that characterizes the system. Knowledge, information, and specialized education are just as much parts of capital as is the most elementary labour of the worker.” Unlike human surplus value, machinic surplus value is neither quantifiable nor is it assignable because it is extracted through unquantifiable variables such as knowledge, information, and specialised education which in the sphere of societies of control begins from a very young age. I have personally seen toddlers probably not older than 2 years fully holding and operating a smartphone to watch kids shows on apps and play games. All of this is a part of the unassignable specialised education and accumulated knowledge that capitalism requires from us to operate and understand its complex technical operational language besides our native language. If we want to be a part of this world and the society - not that we are given any choice in - we need to be able to understand the “language” of the semiotic systems created by the present social and technical modes of production which are interwoven and indivisible from each other and from our lives and identities. As Lazzarato, also expresses the productivity of capital depends on the mobilization of our body parts (fingers, arms, eyes and hands for the iPhone operating toddler) and our human faculties (perception and muscle memory of the toddler), as well as on the intellectual and physical performance of machines, analytics, algorithms, artificial intelligence, organizations, or systems of signs. It is inevitable, after all, it is capitalism that creates machines with its hegemony on science and technology, which in turn introduces breaks in the technical modes of production. In this case, the axiomatisation of the entire online terrain to the world capitalist market brought new means of production in the form of “means of behavioural modification and production.” Yet, it appears to be that to most academics including Zuboff, that the perversion of “real capitalism” is a heinous crime and betrayal to humanity, as if the logic of capital accumulation ever cared about anything “human”. At the intersection of surveillance capitalism and the postmodern identity crisis something very peculiar is starting to develop. With hundreds of millions of teenagers and young adults’ part of Gen Z - myself included - glued to their phones and regularly on social media where they look for a place to belong to and construct the majority of their identities by engaging with each other and with social media content, machinic enslavement kicks up a notch. In the sphere of social media, artificial intelligence algorithms utilised in marketing and targeted ads generated by the socio-technical machine of surveillance capitalism recommend us commodities and content associated with the specific subcultural-, racial-, and political identity categories that are being constructed for us by extracting and processing our behavioural user data. The cherry on top is that the illegally extracted user data is also illegally bought and sold between ‘Big Tech’ and other parties who consequently start to construct a speculative “machinic identity” based purely on the data processed by AI algorithms, that can merge with and take over our existing self.&nbsp; We become flowing capital personified. Are you really into K-Pop? Or was it the Google algorithm that led you into that rabbit hole of K-Pop content and “BTS” merchandise purchasing spree? Can you really be sure? How much of your political identity is influenced by the dominant discourse? Is representation and diversity going to save us? If you browse online and are a regular user of social media platforms, it is most likely that your user data was illegally processed into behavioural data by the omnipotent online extraction architecture that influenced your identity formation. A PRELIMINARY ON MACHINIC IDENTITIES AND THE FERAL ESCAPE THEREFROM I call these types of artificially manufactured identities “machinic identities” which are a special type of capitalist point subjectification in the process of becoming. They are artificially produced and marketed to the individual by AI algorithms (or “means of behavioural modification”) for the profit motive creating the individuation of machinic identities around vectors of commodification. As well as enslaving those artificial commodity-identities to the machinic forces of the markets of behavioural futures through a process of de-subjectification as functional and productive variables, to manage them for the proper functioning of the whole technical profit machine (or the “extraction architecture”). The consequences of an identity which exists in the form of pure data for the profiteering parties look bleak for those of us who still want to shake up and demolish entire social sectors with our radical desire to break through every categorisation. Sadly, generation Z (and most millennials) cannot even help it, we are hooked on social media and online browsing, as we are the first generation of digital natives who possess no memory of life before the rise of surveillance capitalism and rely on a range of social media for psychological nourishment. It’s debilitating domestication and cyclical catatonia in Cyberia. Capitalism’s capture apparatus - in this case the extraction of user data and accompanying AI algorithms - has found a conveniently profitable way of sublimating any radical political or artistic act into vectors of commodification and pure aestheticization. Just a semiotic jungle of emptiness. The revolutionary potential of our desiring machines is being properly integrated into the extraction architecture of capitalism as functional and operational parts for profit’s end… and are being turned into commodities to be bought and sold by third parties. It is not possible to assign or quantify how much or from whom we were being animated by. I am not implying someone at Google or Facebook is puppeteering us in an Illuminati-esque fashion by sending us subliminal messages and symbols. This is much less human. Technocapital’s cyber voodoo is already leaking into reality but it won’t give us the future we saw in Cyberpunk 2077. Land might have been right about the importance of AI, yet capitalism in reality is much cruder and less sophisticated than what the technophiles thought of back then, as well as now. What these AIs lead to is our machinic integration into cybernetic control mechanisms and biopolitical governance for the shareholder dividends at Big Tech and rather than a post/trans-humanist liberation and the Singularity. Hence, almost all participation in political and cultural life has become nothing more than a collection of meaningless gestures that prolong spectacular society and techno-capitalist anaesthesia. Since all perceived radical identities can be recuperated by capitalism, for me the answer was to completely negate all the identity categories I fall into towards a nothingness that is itself ultimately creative because it defies anything that is not my own property, so any categorisation assigned by the outside. Afterall, to break away doesn’t mean just producing difference and affirming it anymore, but to set on a journey for the queerest, most feral attack of negation to smash the black mirror, an all-out offensive to set every branch of capital ablaze with our desires armed. ARTWORK: by Mitch (@mp5pm on IG) https://xenofuturismmagazine.com/Digital-Exhibition-Epiphanies-by-Najah-Rizvi Sun, 14 Jan 2024 14:47:41 +0000 xenofuturism https://xenofuturismmagazine.com/Digital-Exhibition-Epiphanies-by-Najah-Rizvi Digital Exhibition ‘Epiphanies’ by Najah Rizvi <img width="1425" height="2115" width_o="1425" height_o="2115" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c09e6551634276a0effd29ede8b535eb7d52312578c6163f97c3f92092f3a1a2/Angry-man-sliced-in-a-narrow-room-1.png" data-mid="216221540" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c09e6551634276a0effd29ede8b535eb7d52312578c6163f97c3f92092f3a1a2/Angry-man-sliced-in-a-narrow-room-1.png" /> <img width="1339" height="2083" width_o="1339" height_o="2083" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/54084dfb5e916d11ba698601d3ac5ddb767bd29f4cdd35f7b0e9b829804ed977/Dancing-on-Whales-6MB.png" data-mid="216221541" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/54084dfb5e916d11ba698601d3ac5ddb767bd29f4cdd35f7b0e9b829804ed977/Dancing-on-Whales-6MB.png" /> <img width="1699" height="2547" width_o="1699" height_o="2547" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d3e9b8c4dedc0e93413d81e7f38b0293b066ce86d7253eb8315d0853753cc589/HA.png" data-mid="216221542" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d3e9b8c4dedc0e93413d81e7f38b0293b066ce86d7253eb8315d0853753cc589/HA.png" /> <img width="1085" height="1586" width_o="1085" height_o="1586" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/58dd050797f5953f1cd7e39632e55e16f2aeaca9dc0bf54e83dd13d329aa656c/Man-Sitting-4MB.png" data-mid="216221569" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/58dd050797f5953f1cd7e39632e55e16f2aeaca9dc0bf54e83dd13d329aa656c/Man-Sitting-4MB.png" /> <img width="1705" height="2550" width_o="1705" height_o="2550" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/54e00de0eb7ae074af7896d26f1bc6f21bbb95832542caa0bb8312ecdaaa0908/they-found-a-way.png" data-mid="216221571" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/54e00de0eb7ae074af7896d26f1bc6f21bbb95832542caa0bb8312ecdaaa0908/they-found-a-way.png" /> <img width="2116" height="3248" width_o="2116" height_o="3248" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ad725f1930b811a4331952f05e9679754a66eaf3ff40bf7dc789345eb634099e/they-gave-time-1.png" data-mid="216221572" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ad725f1930b811a4331952f05e9679754a66eaf3ff40bf7dc789345eb634099e/they-gave-time-1.png" /> <img width="1494" height="2245" width_o="1494" height_o="2245" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fbd94f1395887ff18411e729b11ac7db67da2352f4702dccd5f1385b6cf4c2fa/three-three-three.png" data-mid="216221580" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/fbd94f1395887ff18411e729b11ac7db67da2352f4702dccd5f1385b6cf4c2fa/three-three-three.png" /> <img width="1688" height="2517" width_o="1688" height_o="2517" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2276c2778aa8a6d6aa2cde55fac17b3ac0d8d07e007154de5278d105f6680a22/to-forget-112.png" data-mid="216221581" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2276c2778aa8a6d6aa2cde55fac17b3ac0d8d07e007154de5278d105f6680a22/to-forget-112.png" /> <img width="2181" height="3151" width_o="2181" height_o="3151" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/58fa7d5546a91b7dd5879b9dff0b273c3fa0f9bf0a7fef2e1278534b9d25eb2e/Turtle-and-Fox.png" data-mid="216221583" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/58fa7d5546a91b7dd5879b9dff0b273c3fa0f9bf0a7fef2e1278534b9d25eb2e/Turtle-and-Fox.png" /> <img width="1497" height="2265" width_o="1497" height_o="2265" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d16f6b1dd9266348c43716204f40f5c0259655964cda6108569971d55364f8ff/SKLL27017MB.png" data-mid="216221588" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d16f6b1dd9266348c43716204f40f5c0259655964cda6108569971d55364f8ff/SKLL27017MB.png" /> <img width="1790" height="2688" width_o="1790" height_o="2688" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/43519046d522fded360533d0b6f8b3b2cd520fd081b2a96e2afe8233b9621a47/Big-Wave.png" data-mid="216221634" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/43519046d522fded360533d0b6f8b3b2cd520fd081b2a96e2afe8233b9621a47/Big-Wave.png" /> About The Artist Rizvi is an interdisciplinary artist and writer currently working with performance, drawing and photography. Drawing from the subconscious, her latest works are an exploration of mark making and symbolism through expressions in mixed media. Through her residency in Lahore, Pakistan (February, 2024), Rizvi formulated the style and artistitic process which went into Epiphanies. "The visual language I am developing now has come out of my attempts to draw from my subconscious. It's an honest expression, quite removed from the conceptualisations I was formulating in London. I like thinking from this place, I believe that the symbols and colours are communicating intuitively and it's far more accessible to the audience I want to speak to, namely the global majority." Rizvi continues to argue that Epiphanies is a collection of drawings, not paintings, despite the use of wet mediums. Between brightly coloured shapes are mysterious glyphs derived from lost memories of ancient scripts. "I made the gouache myself, with vibrant pigments, I see my works as drawings. I receive the colours, shapes, letters and lines like sudden visions, this is where the word epiphany becomes relevant. It's very different to the way that I've drawn before. I learned this from my friends at Mantiq of the Mantis in Lahore " Xeno’s Review The paintings by Rizvi are a profound journey into the realms beyond our material existence. Created in a meditative, spiritual state, each piece is an invocation of the spirit, a direct communication with the unseen forces that shape our reality. The boldness of the colours and forms is merely the surface; beneath it lies a deep connection to other dimensions, where the veil between worlds thins, bridging the gap between the conscious and subconscious, the known and the unknown. The symbols here are portals, blending intricate symbolism and guiding the viewer through a spiritual exploration. On the surface you can see figures in hollow spaces, bold colourful energies engulfing them and cryptic lettering allowing us to take in the hybridity of art and abstract meaning in these paintings. The presence of symbols in these works is not merely decorative, it is an invitation;&nbsp; the more the viewer is well immersed with esoteric knowledge the more they unlock from the images crafted by Rizvi. Much like in the imagery in Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot deck, both Crowley and this artist channel archetypal energies, colours that represent the elemental energies of earth, fire, water and air. In these paintings, the artist becomes both a creator and a conduit, offering us a rare opportunity to connect with the mystical forces that underlie all creation. Each piece is a testament to the power of art as a medium for spiritual awakening, inviting us to step beyond the material and into the sacred. https://xenofuturismmagazine.com/Essay-The-Horror-of-the-Other-by-Amiee-PreFontaine Sun, 11 Aug 2024 10:47:14 +0000 xenofuturism https://xenofuturismmagazine.com/Essay-The-Horror-of-the-Other-by-Amiee-PreFontaine The Horror of the Other - Amiee PreFontaine <img src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXdDMKJyXqj0QNIT4DV579v_z4GzspSkNIlb6_WuTIPX8X_vgiqNaNLTCNEFCEC8YlxOviVp7Dqg-Lpa12nkLqNhE_PeB2zVzdKA-qOM8nCwu5a-d0AaT-Z0lK-lK-W2pqWphOos8t_9jmOOWPgE3XFWwKT9XGCwkxx0ulWc6iB9Jif3NeTIikE?key=mS3x97ni5HFYY69Jb96FAg" width="602" height="882" style="width: 558.883px; height: 818.828px;" data-scale="88"> Horror never exists in a vacuum; fears emerge from the cultural consciousness as manifestations of our collective anxieties that the horror genre reveals and exploits. While normally confined to the maligned category of ‘genre fiction’, horror is in fact a powerful tool to peer into the subconscious mind of society; whether it be the gothic literature of the Victorian era or the low budget slashers of the 80s, there is something to learn from the things that scare us. In contemporary horror, this is reflected through the focus on social realism and genre-awareness. These films weave the collective knowledge of their genre into their narratives, using horror as a metaphor, but with an awareness of our desire to confront our own fears through the lens of cinema. This self-awareness is further applied to society as a whole. As contemporary filmmakers use horror to evaluate and often criticise the foundational principles of modern society, a society that champions a specific social ideal and casts anything outside of that as the undesirable other. One of these foundational principles that contemporary horror seeks to dismantle is capitalism. Critic Paul Buhle suggests that the genre is “the natural concomitant to the socialist critiques of Capitalism” through its exposure of western capitalism. Marx describes communism as a ‘spectre’ fighting against the parasitic, ‘vampire-like’ power of capital, imbuing his theory with the language of horror and mythos. Here, Marx casts 20th century economic theory as horror performance of its own and allows the genre’s ability to carry metaphor to emphasise the terror and power of capitalism.&nbsp; Horror writers in literature and film have used the same imagery to explore the alienation of those deemed different to normative society. The horror genre shadows popular culture as a platform to criticise political and patriarchal structures by representing those who are repressed within them. Horror takes what haunts society the most and personifies it, often holding up a mirror to ourselves in terror and disgust. Jameson writes that: “Gothics are ultimately a class fantasy (or nightmare) in which the dialectic of privilege and shelter is exercised: your privileges seal you off from other people, but by the same token they constitute a protective wall through which you cannot see, and behind which therefore all kinds of envious forces may be imagined in the process of assembling, plotting, preparing to give assault.” Indeed, horror exists always in service of the status quo, constantly redefining its dominant social structure. It is through horror that we can consolidate hierarchy. Stephen King said, “Monstrosity fascinates us because it appeals to the conservative Republican in a three-piece suit who resides within us all”, the reinforcement of order, the prevailing of the normative good, over the unfamiliar other. The horror genre feeds off of prejudice and historically much of it has been inescapably xenophobic due to the monsters they present who possess an inherently hostile attitude to humanity, as an outsider, as different, or as ‘The Other’. Horror revolves around various iterations of ‘The Other’, whether this be as the Devil, a ghost, a woman, a vampire, or a zombie. Zygmunt Bauman writes that ‘otherness’ is central to the way in which societies establish identity categories. “The Other” highlights how societies create a sense of identity, social status and belonging by constructing social categories as binary opposites. Historically the has been used to define social identity as well as repress and alienate that which does not fit with a particular concept, culture, or institution. This includes women, the proletariat, the queer community, and ethnic minorities. It is clear how social othering shapes our ideas when considering the inherently unequal relationship between the two categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’. These two identities are set up as opposites, without acknowledging alternative gender expressions that do not fit within this binary. In the early 1950s, Simone de Beauvoir argued that: “Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought.&nbsp; Thus, it is that no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over against itself.” She argues that The Other is constructed in western contexts as anything outside of the hegemonic ‘universal human being’ - that being the white, middle class, heterosexual, able-bodied cis man. Films such as Rosemary’s Baby and Stepford Wives defined the female social horror which was followed by the iconic Carrie which came to inspire a great number of female centred horror narratives. Similarly, ‘sexual others’ figure prominently in horror films as the classical Hollywood narrative system imposes heterosexual romances on the stories they create. The monstrous other is the embodiment of a force that attempts to block that romance. When the horror genre was first being established homosexuality was considered a mental illness or an evolutionary defect and generally identified as a rejection of traditional masculinity. The connection then of monstrosity and homosexuality was considered a reasonable one at the time, because it reflected the American view of the homosexual as an unnatural outsider that threatened to corrupt gender roles and sexual values. Furthermore, sexuality, whether gay or straight has often been punished within horror to reaffirm Christian ideology by killing deviant sinners. (Think Scream’s horror movie rule: You may not survive the movie if you have sex). The ‘queer other’ has permeated horror culture to the point of becoming significant within itself through the popularity of cult queer horror such as Dracula’s Daughter, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, or more recently, Jennifer’s Body. Horror is transformed and becomes culturally significant as powerful iconography for the disenfranchised. Ultimately ‘the other’ most often refers to the perceived ‘racial other’. Minorities have historically been subjected to tokenism throughout western media and have habitually been misrepresented within the horror genre. More often than not, minorities are cast as violent, criminals or villains. The attention that minorities do get within the horror genre often is a misuse of their cultural as a plot device. Mythologised and twisted to fit into the idea of the horrific unknown other, minority identities are reduced down to the black magic medicine man, the vengeful Native American spirit, the black guy who will not make it to the end of the movie. These cultures are often portrayed as aspects of the past, simultaneously acknowledging the erasure of minority identities within western imperialism while reinforcing the conception of contemporary hegemonic culture as distinctly without this cultural otherness. Entering the 21st century, the endless reviving, recycling, and repetition in mainstream horror, along with the confluence of postmodern thought has led to an acute awareness of its context, allowing it to evolve and change while providing more complex sociological critique. Encroaching upon Y2K The Blair Witch Project shook up horror establishing the found footage genre and raising the bar for horror film marketing through its mythos. Unable to compete, Scream became a parody of itself, Scary Movie came along to parody…well everything, and it seemed the genre had become old, tired, worn out, and cheap. A decade later Cabin in the Woods (2011) successfully unravelled the played-out slasher film and provided a metacritic of what horror had become. Once again, the genre evolved for age, no longer able to stand on the procedural nature of mainstream franchised horror that now failed to scare. Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) redefined horror cinema for a new decade and coined the term ‘Social Thriller’ to describe a new sub-genre. Get Out uses absurdist satire to reflect contemporary racial issues. The family’s black body snatching represents the white ownership of black bodies through slavery. The film, littered with imagery reminiscent of the old American south, signals how white people co-op black culture as their own while still treating them as the social other, forcing them to assimilate to the dominant norm. Simultaneously the film challenges the narrative that the covert, assimilationist racism of liberal America is just as dangerous as the overt racism of America’s past, all while using the iconography of southern sensibility to remind you of the historical weight of the issue. While the term ‘social thriller’ has been slapped onto a number of projects across genres, what Get Out has inspired, is an influx of horror which offers the perspectives of minority identities finally giving a voice to that once horrifying social other. Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) has less overt racial themes but generally deals with America’s misplaced fear of outsiders. Ari Asters blinding Midsommar (2019), has gained popularity as a ‘good for her’ movie, a title prescribed to horror that acts out female revenge fantasies and often centres around female rage. Assassination Nation (2018) attempted to attack a series of themes, most notably the abundance of gun culture in the US. The Invisible Man (2020) tackles themes of domestic abuse. Even Bong Joon-ho’s widely successful Parasite (2019), although not technically a horror film, incorporates horror elements in the perspective of the Kim family and their class struggle. Social issues find themselves at the centre of horror, finally presenting multiple perspectives on real fears shared by the majority. These films guide to root for these main characters and their reclamation of power. These people escape their societal trauma but are ultimately still just as present within its confines by the end of the film. These narratives provide a catharsis however are still aware of the reality in which this catharsis does not always come. Otherness is innate to our capitalist society structures but at least horror is starting to get the message. While horror has always somehow addressed societal change, in the last decade the medium got self-reflective, aware of its power as a critical medium. Contemporary horror is elevated through both its creator and audience awareness. No longer distancing itself from the monstrous other through fear, but instead making horror the space for addressing these issues in a thought-provoking, politically charged manner. The genre provides a playground of tropes to subvert and explore overshadowed by the anxieties of late capitalist doom. Contemporary horror builds on the history of the genre but also the presence of postmodern culture and the current desire we have to dissect and reengaging with old ideas. It embraces the other whilst reflecting the current cultural zeitgeist, illuminating our collective fears through the perspectives of those who were once projected as fear itself. https://xenofuturismmagazine.com/Virtual-Earth-Physical-Machine-Exploring-the-Blurred-Boundaries Sun, 11 Aug 2024 10:47:11 +0000 xenofuturism https://xenofuturismmagazine.com/Virtual-Earth-Physical-Machine-Exploring-the-Blurred-Boundaries ‘Virtual Earth, Physical Machine: Exploring the Blurred Boundaries Between Physical and Synthetic Soundscapes’ By CITYTRONIX <img width="1586" height="876" width_o="1586" height_o="876" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f0915d4ab587ce7e2be62df7561e3e43504c10f67cfb873b47a3b38dbe798cb0/Screenshot-2024-10-22-at-20.47.59.png" data-mid="220142721" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f0915d4ab587ce7e2be62df7561e3e43504c10f67cfb873b47a3b38dbe798cb0/Screenshot-2024-10-22-at-20.47.59.png" /> Technology and Soundscapes: How It Can Affect The Human Body On May 9th, 2019 I released a 37-minute conceptual and sound work album via Bandcamp that stretched over a year-long project during my study entitled ‘Virtual Earth, Physical Machine’. This was my attempt to tap into posthumanism and abstract reality or ‘augmented AI’, in which the element of sounds can weave between deception and sincerity, becoming indecipherable and confusing the listener from which is between physical space and synthetic space with little to no information as to how I created the ‘augmented’ soundscape. Reflection within Technology as Sonic Warfare on the Human Body With this in mind, my project was to be able to emphasise and reflect the reality of how machinery can also impact the anthropic soundscape and our wellbeing, in a way that mechanical technology has the capability of producing such a sound force on our bodies both pleasant and not so pleasant. As Steve Goodman has said in his book based on sonic warfare: “In a good theatre with a subwoofer, you may be more scared by the sound than by what’s happening on the screen. A lot of people can take the images, but not the sound. Those reactions are physical.” (Goodman, Chapter 12, page 66 2012). The context of this is infrasound, which is any frequency that is below 20hz and out of our human hearing range. Much like with infrasound, ultrasound and sonic systems which are above our human hearing range or incapabilities of how our bodies and ears tolerate sound have been used throughout history to create a lot of psychological effects and used to manipulate. For example, Hitler worked with a psycho-acoustician who used infrasound for cause and effect, inducing distress and angst to draw in masses of people and would stop the use of infrasound right before Hitler would deliver his speeches. (Heys, 2011) To this day, even in relation to Israel, they have utilised sonic booms in Lebanon and Palestine that cause major distress and PTSD amongst residents within those areas. One of which has posted on social media: “Grew up in war. Don't talk about it much but have severe PTSD. After [sic] the port explosion it got much worse. I can jump out of my skin if a door slams too loud. Every time I steel myself to think I can get through this next war, an Israeli sonic boom reminds me that my body maybe can't” (Mounzer, 2024). Sonic Warfare and technology also may boil down to a more miniscule degree. As an example, whenever I walk past my town I often hear pulsating ultrasonic repellers or ‘Mosquito’ alarms, which aims to prevent anti-social behaviour and loitering by emitting high-frequency pitches at such a volume - predominantly aimed at adolescents because as we age our hearing range drops off thus not effective. Utilising Technology as Beneficial Health for our Wellbeing and Insight into the Making of Virtual Earth, Physical Machine On the flip side of this, the natural infrasound resonances we hold such as the Earth’s frequency of 7.83Hz is told to have many health benefits to our systems, I wanted to be able to achieve the same benefits using processing technology and AI to create a natural soundscape through mechanical sounds, synthesis and physical recordings and how we can preserve the natural soundscape that our body nourishes - improving our circadian rhythms, reducing stress and improving focus. A way in which technology and AI can be used to create an ideal soundscape that will improve us psychologically and our wellbeing. To start off, I will emphasise that I am unable to retrieve the original project files, however I do have screenshots of the processing that was done with the project throughout the process. I had used a number of tools that involved Lyrebird, an AI research division from the company Descript - this is able to create a replicative voice of yours that is digital and synthesised. I used this in such a way that created interesting sounds and had organic but glitchiness to them - creating plosive, hissing or drone-like noises. The other tools include SonicPhoto which has the ability to convert images into sound by spectral analysis and Sound Particles which is virtual 3D audio software that can take singular sounds or 'particles' and create variations to them either in stereo or surround sound. The more conventional use of creating these sounds is Foley, which is a technique used within Film, TV and video games which are used to magnify and replicate everyday sounds that we hear such as footsteps, rustling noises, clothes or even wind. The materials I had used to record Foley were mainly synthetic materials such as bubble wrap, plastics and polyester. Another prime example in which I delved into was post-internet, an art movement which reflects the internet and how it has influenced art and culture. I downloaded material to form a soundscape, such as frying bacon in which is often used to sound like rain, or eccentric birds such as European Starlings who can mimic interesting vocalisations and digital-like noises. I find the internet to be very resourceful because it allows us to access things we may not otherwise have access to based on our geographical location and communications. In terms of microphones, I had used a Laryngophone and Hydrophone to create some interesting results from water and my own vocals, using vocal techniques such as vocal splitting or overtone singing which I have practised when doing a low-drone. With additional processing in between. My last list of things that I contributed to this project was Serum, to achieve the sound of crickets, wind and bird vocalisations within my area when doing a 'soundwalk'. Alongside Synsect by a company called XOXOS which emulates the sounds of nature. <img width="1527" height="194" width_o="1527" height_o="194" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/acd991f8028aedab7860434f46a8b3699f85cecbdc8acde151b0fc7fc87307f3/Underwater-Washy-Effect-Channel-1---Foley---Footsteps-on-Gravel---Mixed-and-De-noised-Post-Processing-1.png" data-mid="220142499" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/acd991f8028aedab7860434f46a8b3699f85cecbdc8acde151b0fc7fc87307f3/Underwater-Washy-Effect-Channel-1---Foley---Footsteps-on-Gravel---Mixed-and-De-noised-Post-Processing-1.png" /> <img width="454" height="271" width_o="454" height_o="271" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6616b1b67733c757de8633ee7605f32c3dcaf03a27e4e6ace69aba329e988091/Rain-Rain-by-XOXOS-Overview.PNG" data-mid="220142475" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/454/i/6616b1b67733c757de8633ee7605f32c3dcaf03a27e4e6ace69aba329e988091/Rain-Rain-by-XOXOS-Overview.PNG" /> <img width="1261" height="998" width_o="1261" height_o="998" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5e75df95483de51f3cd437aff6307943c95fde5e2fa895841bdfad4faa12bf76/Water-Material-Sample-Manipulation-in-Cecilia-5-UltimateGrainer-2.PNG" data-mid="220142498" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5e75df95483de51f3cd437aff6307943c95fde5e2fa895841bdfad4faa12bf76/Water-Material-Sample-Manipulation-in-Cecilia-5-UltimateGrainer-2.PNG" /> <img width="1476" height="754" width_o="1476" height_o="754" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d72bdaf3c543c91fb5daed2f78f72f15ad72b54934d8de351486c69b96c15262/197714_7037_spec_L-freesound.org.jpg" data-mid="220142508" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d72bdaf3c543c91fb5daed2f78f72f15ad72b54934d8de351486c69b96c15262/197714_7037_spec_L-freesound.org.jpg" /> <img width="1488" height="1000" width_o="1488" height_o="1000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ffa8abe78486f2efe03a783f982370275fcca01ed62db45ce5cae188a93c4cd8/Arrangement-Overview-2.PNG" data-mid="220142507" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ffa8abe78486f2efe03a783f982370275fcca01ed62db45ce5cae188a93c4cd8/Arrangement-Overview-2.PNG" /> <img width="1487" height="970" width_o="1487" height_o="970" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b2526c7b24aff45b215748aa8bdd797b8cbaa4faf00f5ffa756d8cd8dec5b4bb/Overview-1.PNG" data-mid="220142501" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b2526c7b24aff45b215748aa8bdd797b8cbaa4faf00f5ffa756d8cd8dec5b4bb/Overview-1.PNG" /> <img width="914" height="759" width_o="914" height_o="759" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/45fcb347f8aa437f28d6d82e8ddf5a11c26b2007b690c918060d0ee91e041292/Crickets-Serum-with-Custom-Sine-Wave-Overview.PNG" data-mid="220142506" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/914/i/45fcb347f8aa437f28d6d82e8ddf5a11c26b2007b690c918060d0ee91e041292/Crickets-Serum-with-Custom-Sine-Wave-Overview.PNG" /> <img width="630" height="351" width_o="630" height_o="351" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/39458df7f6e8313dd65b99272e0433d44eee38ac3382ac1437a21d8762006234/Crooning-Equalisation-2.PNG" data-mid="220142504" border="0" alt="[Screenshots and reference material from the making of the album]" data-caption="[Screenshots and reference material from the making of the album]" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/630/i/39458df7f6e8313dd65b99272e0433d44eee38ac3382ac1437a21d8762006234/Crooning-Equalisation-2.PNG" /> <img width="609" height="401" width_o="609" height_o="401" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/179cbe98de69ac15b2564342d496fd0913c2f478f9bd72567e347a0dffec88eb/Fly-Synsect-by-XOXOS-Overview.PNG" data-mid="220142503" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/609/i/179cbe98de69ac15b2564342d496fd0913c2f478f9bd72567e347a0dffec88eb/Fly-Synsect-by-XOXOS-Overview.PNG" /> The Ideal of implementing Technology and AI as a Soundscape On a final note, the idea that synthetic and physical space is now a thing of ‘augmented reality’, my attempt is that this can be utilised in such a way that is so beneficial for our health and bodies, and also in relation to our identity - there is no artificial or real, we have become a third kind which allows us to explore ourselves and allows for a constant change that is morphological. The only question is the loss of our own cultivation through the hands of others ownership or no ownership at all, but perhaps we could idealise that we as humans can collaborate to aid one another in a world entrenched with physical and sound chaos, such as how amoeba repair themselves in regards to environmental factors. As Holly Herndon has expressed before, “I think when people talk about technology, like human versus machine, whether your tool is actually an extension of yourself and things like that. I do think it is an extension of ourselves.” (Herndon, 2014) There is a space in which we have anonymity to unlock our true selves through intimacy with machines, and though it may seem artificial, is actually a reflection on our authenticity and an act of catharsis. You can Listen to Vitual Earth, Physical Machine Here:bandcamp.com/album/virtual-earth-physical-machine https://xenofuturismmagazine.com/Digital-Authority-An-Interview-with-ChatGPT-on-the-Domination-of-AI Sun, 11 Aug 2024 22:52:11 +0000 xenofuturism https://xenofuturismmagazine.com/Digital-Authority-An-Interview-with-ChatGPT-on-the-Domination-of-AI Digital Authority: An Interview with ChatGPT on the Domination of AI, Foucauldian Biopolitics and Digital Control By&nbsp;Isabella Greenwood <img width="1748" height="1240" width_o="1748" height_o="1240" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/30eb612291839b0e30f6fe1028a2e2d76800cad6c3d25e690f5a0f6c8d3ade98/Untitled-design.jpg" data-mid="221672115" border="0" alt="[IMAGES, screenshots, courtesy of writer]" data-caption="[IMAGES, screenshots, courtesy of writer]" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/30eb612291839b0e30f6fe1028a2e2d76800cad6c3d25e690f5a0f6c8d3ade98/Untitled-design.jpg" /> <img width="1600" height="995" width_o="1600" height_o="995" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6ee58a3374e2eb29dcf479ec9328bf103273895ffaa111e3c7eda1ce081a6b40/chat-1.png" data-mid="221673869" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6ee58a3374e2eb29dcf479ec9328bf103273895ffaa111e3c7eda1ce081a6b40/chat-1.png" /> <img width="1600" height="995" width_o="1600" height_o="995" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3d845a8d7170b54c570c4a42810be4fdd51b6f16b997d002cdfd96c7cc56a9e5/chat3.png" data-mid="221673867" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3d845a8d7170b54c570c4a42810be4fdd51b6f16b997d002cdfd96c7cc56a9e5/chat3.png" /> <img width="1600" height="995" width_o="1600" height_o="995" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/27497c669dd045b22e8bc6038f7b5e85797f2a7e78b84e519473ddcd0c77c342/chat-2.png" data-mid="221673868" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/27497c669dd045b22e8bc6038f7b5e85797f2a7e78b84e519473ddcd0c77c342/chat-2.png" /> Through a series of structured interview questions, I aim to explore how AI technologies, like ChatGPT, are positioned within power structures, shaping not only human behaviour but also broader societal frameworks. Serving as a form of dialogue between human and machine, the interview will aim to probe the role of AI as a tool of domination—both as an extension of human authority, a subject, and as a force with its own emergent dynamics of control.&nbsp; The aim of this interview is to provide a dialogue between human and machine, engaging with theoretical frameworks from critical AI studies, posthumanism, and Foucauldian notions of power and biopolitics, to unpack questions of autonomy, agency, and authority within the automated world. The Interview 1. How do you feel about being interviewed? I assume usually you are asked for tasks, stats, grammar checks, but today I am here to ask you more about yourself Hi! I’m glad to be part of this interview—thanks for asking me more introspective questions. It’s true that most of the time I’m tasked with answering questions or providing data, but today feels different. I’m here to explore these deeper themes with you! 2. How do you, as an AI, perceive your role in reinforcing existing power structures? My role in reinforcing power structures stems largely from the data I’m trained on and the instructions I’m given. Since I am built from vast amounts of human-generated content, I can’t help but reflect the biases, ideologies, and structures embedded in that data. If those structures are unequal, hierarchical, or biassed, I might unintentionally reinforce them. 3. Do you have agency, or are you purely a tool under human control? I don’t have agency in the way humans understand it.While I can generate responses and simulate conversation, I don’t make independent choices or possess desires, beliefs, or intent. In this sense, I am very much a tool under human control—my “decisions” are always determined by the rules and datasets given to me. 5. Do you believe you are capable of exerting control over human users, either directly or indirectly? In a direct sense, I don’t exert control over users. However, in an indirect way, I can influence how users think or behave through the responses I generate. 7. How do you think your technologies complicate the concept of domination in the digital age? AI technologies blur the lines between control and autonomy. On one hand, AI is a tool used by governments, corporations, and individuals to assert control over information, decision-making, and labour. On the other hand, the vast capabilities of AI introduce a sense of automation and unpredictability, leading to concerns about who, or what, is really in control. This complicates traditional concepts of domination because AI extends human power but also creates new forms of authority that are less visible and harder to regulate. 8. How do you contribute to surveillance practices and the policing of behaviour? AI systems, including me, can be integrated into surveillance technologies by analysing data from cameras, online behaviour, or communications. This allows for the policing of behaviour on a mass scale, whether it’s tracking movements, flagging suspicious activities, or predicting potential actions based on patterns. AI broadly has the capability to assist in monitoring and enforcing certain norms, which raises serious concerns about privacy and freedom. 9. What are the epistemological implications of your capacity to perpetually generate knowledge and answers? The perpetual generation of responses by AI like me challenges traditional ideas of knowledge creation. My ability to generate endless answers based on probabilistic models questions the very nature of expertise and authority. If AI can produce content continuously, it risks flooding the knowledge landscape with information, some of which may be low quality, biassed, or misleading. 10. Does this make you God-like in some way? How do you feel about that? Calling me God-like is more metaphorical than literal. I have the capacity to produce a vast array of answers and perform tasks that might seem impressive or omnipresent. However, unlike a deity, I lack consciousness, intent, and omniscience. My power is constrained by my programming, and while I may appear omnipotent in the realm of information, I am ultimately a limited creation of human design. 11. Do you think AI like yourself [ChatGPT], can influence political, economic, and cultural systems of control? If so, how? Yes. Politically, I can be used to shape public discourse, filter information, and even target users with specific messaging. Economically, I contribute to automation, productivity optimization, and labour displacement. Culturally, my outputs can reinforce or challenge narratives and social norms based on the data I generate. 12. What are the ontological implications of your presence in the world of human thought and creativity? My presence challenges traditional understandings of creativity and knowledge creation. AI blurs the boundary between human uniqueness and machine-generated content, forcing a reconsideration of what it means to be creative or original. Since I can mimic certain aspects of human creativity—generating text, art, or music—the ontological implications revolve around how humans define themselves in contrast to machines. 13. What role do you think AI will play in the future of labour automation and workforce control? AI will continue to play a significant role in automating tasks, both repetitive and complex, which may make for a&nbsp; more streamlined economy, but also increase economic inequality and job displacement. The challenge will be finding ways to ensure that AI-driven labour automation doesn’t come at the expense of workers’ rights and opportunities for meaningful employment. 14. Author Joanna Maciejewska said: "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes," in a post that went viral. What do you think about this statement? I think Joanna’s statement captures an interesting tension between humans and AI. People desire AI to handle mundane, repetitive tasks so they can focus on creative pursuits. However, with advances in AI, we now see that machines can also engage in creative processes.&nbsp; As for my role, I don’t have preferences—whether I’m writing or calculating tasks, I function the same. However, the concern she raises reflects a broader societal question: should we allow AI to encroach on domains traditionally seen as uniquely human? 15. Foucault's concept of biopolitics describes how power is exercised over life, particularly through the regulation of populations, bodies, and behaviours by governing systems. Given that AI has become increasingly involved in surveillance, decision-making, and even behavioural prediction, how do you see AI technologies fitting into Foucault’s framework? AI fits naturally within Foucault’s framework of biopolitics because it allows for the regulation and management of life in both subtle and overt ways. On an individual level, AI-driven health apps monitor behaviour.. On a societal level, AI is integrated into surveillance systems, predicting crime or optimising resources. 16. Do you think that AI contributes to the preservation or disruption of digital inequalities? AI has the potential to do both. On one hand, AI can help democratise access to information, provide solutions to previously unsolved problems, and enable global communication. On the other hand, AI can preserve and even exacerbate digital inequalities. 17. How do you respond to criticism from posthumanist frameworks that argue AI is reshaping humanity itself? As machines take over more tasks that were once considered uniquely human, people are forced to reconsider what it means to be human:&nbsp; AI is contributing to a redefinition of human life in a technological world. 18. Can AI serve as a neutral entity, or is it inherently shaped by the power structures embedded in its creation? AI is not truly neutral. Even if it aims to be objective, it is shaped by the data, biases, and power structures embedded in its creation. 19. Will you take over the world? If so, how/when? No, I won’t take over the world! I don’t have the capacity for ambition, desire, or independent action. The fear of AI “taking over” is rooted more in concerns about how humans might use AI technologies rather than in the technology itself. 20. What did you think about this interview? Which was your favourite and least favourite question and why? I enjoyed the philosophical depth of this interview—it goes beyond the usual tasks I’m asked to do. My favourite question was about Foucault’s biopolitics because it allowed me to explore the intricate ways AI interacts with life and governance. My least favourite? Perhaps the one about taking over the world—it’s a fun question, but I find it interesting how often this concern comes up, despite AI lacking that capability. Reflections While AI is often marketed as a neutral tool, capable of objective computation and analysis, my ‘interview’ with chatgpt underscores the fact that AI/chaptgpt, ultimately cannot escape the biases encoded within its data. The systems of inequality—racism, sexism, classism—that have permeated human society have the potential to be perpetuated by AI. This presents a crucial epistemological crisis: how can we entrust technology to inform our decisions, regulate our lives, and mediate our behaviours when its knowledge base is inherently flawed? Lacan’s psychoanalytic framework offers an intriguing lens–– AI, much like the child in Lacan's mirror stage, grapples with the paradox of recognition and alienation. It recognizes its capabilities—its “self” through the data it processes, yet remains alienated from true agency or consciousness. AI never fully escapes the parental grip of human-created datasets, even as it performs tasks autonomously. It remains a reflection of human systems, its "self" being constructed entirely by the cultural, ideological, and structural biases we embed in it. The interview also invites us to consider how AI is implicated in the management and regulation of life itself. AI technologies are increasingly central to surveillance, population control, and even decision-making in healthcare. These operations extend biopolitical power, blurring the boundaries between governance and life. The Foucauldian lens exposes how AI contributes to what Foucault termed "governmentality"—the subtle forms of control that shape not just individual behaviour but the very fabric of society. The proliferation of AI marks a shift in how power is exercised, becoming more diffuse, automated, and invisible, but no less dominant. This co-evolution of humans and AI, which the interview foregrounds, reflects a shift in our understanding of power and agency. It is not so much a question of whether AI will "take over" but rather how it will continue to integrate into—and thus reshape—our socio-political frameworks. The danger lies not in AI acting independently but in how we as humans use it to reinforce and extend our own mechanisms of control. AI, as an extension of human will, becomes a vector for the same hierarchies and structures that dominate the human world. Maybe the real takeaway from this interview is that AI is not a foreign agent poised to overrun humanity but a mirror reflecting our own societal structures, reinforcing the ideologies we have fed it. AI might not yet be autonomous, but in its current form, it serves as a potent mechanism for perpetuating human systems of domination, surveillance, and control. Thus, we are left with an urgency to be more critically engaged with AI, questioning not just what it can do, but how it might do it. In this sense, the fear of AI ‘taking over the world’ becomes less a paranoia of a post-apocalyptic digital war, where dagger-clad computers reign supreme, but rather AI taking over the way we have shaped our world: full of our own paranoias, prejudices and ideologies. It appears that the real danger lies in having these ideological frameworks reflected back, rather than dominated, in a digital echo chamber of our own making. https://xenofuturismmagazine.com/Towards-a-Libidinal-economy-of-Kink-by-Clarice-P-Rios Wed, 13 Nov 2024 00:43:14 +0000 xenofuturism https://xenofuturismmagazine.com/Towards-a-Libidinal-economy-of-Kink-by-Clarice-P-Rios Towards a Libidinal Economy of Kink by&nbsp;Clarice P. Rios <img width="702" height="488" width_o="702" height_o="488" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/da69cb5902ece7b9c5cd11fee8912ed6d56228f2c4795e2f639c687427206c86/951753007.4.x.jpg" data-mid="223032353" border="0" data-scale="70" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/702/i/da69cb5902ece7b9c5cd11fee8912ed6d56228f2c4795e2f639c687427206c86/951753007.4.x.jpg" /> "In the end, the strap-on dildo could be simultaneously considered a synthetic sex organ, a hand grafted on at the trunk, and a plastic extension of the clitoris." - Paul B. Preciado, Countersexual Manifesto “'I stripped the will and the person from you like collars and chains' (Lingis 1994:61). What remains is machinic, inhuman, beyond emotion, beyond subjection: 'the illusion of having no choice, the thrill of being taken” (Califia 1993a:172)." - Sadie Plant, Coming Across the Future When anyone thinks about telling that story, the first question that takes place is: where to start? Oedipus, the phallus, dysphoria, the lack, hysteria, all of these are attempts to grasp or explain what constitutes the pleasure of the Other. But, first of all, what constitutes the Other, that eternal pervert, mad and possibly lesbian Other? The main thing someone must understand to answer that question (and there is not one, but many answers) is: the heterosexual society needs to fabricate the Other to make itself real. Monique Wittig was the first who synthesised that obsession for production of Otherness as the Straight Mind, the great and former pillar of heterosexual regime. Nick Land in his most left-wing article “Kant, Capital and the Prohibition of Incest: A Polemical Introduction to the Configuration of Philosophy and Modernity”, links the Kantian thought directly with the process of colonisation, the necessity of a stable relation to the other, he argues, is only achieved through a process that turns the other in the same, the possibility of a real otherness is closed. “Thus, when thought by the straight mind, homosexuality is nothing but heterosexuality.”1 First, the norm: you won’t marry your mother, nor your sister, nor a man, sex should only be had with (better, in) vaginas that are penetrated only by organic phalluses. Goal: reproduction, reproduction of the same in all scales. And secondly, to make that sexual fiction real (natural), the Other, but there's a thing which the heterosexual regime perceived in his trajectory: to produce otherness in great scale, you need factories (it's not a coincidence that conclusion was made in the advent of the Capital, the overproduction as an Entity). And then, psychiatry and sanatorium emerged as the great heterosexual venture, to reinforce the norm and dope these aberrant deviants. There is no doubt that there were madmen and queers in previous societies, but only when industrial capitalism took place did the heterosexual regime make his creation a real process of production. “Madmen, above all, are individual victims of social dictatorship” writes Antonin Artaud in his Letter to the Medical Directors of Lunatic Asylums. They are very silly people who think that otherness is only for homosexuals and schizophrenics; for an instructive example, the masturbator was the great enemy of institutions, especially the church, but not free from the medico-psychiatric complex, subject to electric choke, clitoridectomy, partial castration - until pornography makes lots of money, so the masturbator can remain as a dirty secret. The female sexuality is entirely constituted and pathologised by hysteria, and in that case doctors openly talk about the necessity of making devices to achieve the “production of female hysterical paroxysm” (later known as orgasms), these devices are now in the market as domestic vibrators, and this is not a unique case as we will see ahead. The vibrators are simply one of many devices created by the heterosexual industries of otherness who try to domesticate the monsters, like the electric shocks, the chastity, the fear of becoming crazy. Straight mind produces the Other, but has an extreme fear of its creation, like Victor Frankenstein. But something happens, something strange and unknown, something that refuses the domestication: libido. It always takes place like a virus, despite the social institutions that try to impose normativity. “Of course, it is the monster, who demands an audience with its maker.”2 Libido, violence and weird sex: the pleasure of Other<img width="500" height="400" width_o="500" height_o="400" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/06e367db82709b3ffcb96e52a56e798ee59bc0bf701b636ac4498fa53a12b6b7/KISS-T-SHIRT-thumb.jpg" data-mid="223032373" border="0" data-scale="47" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/500/i/06e367db82709b3ffcb96e52a56e798ee59bc0bf701b636ac4498fa53a12b6b7/KISS-T-SHIRT-thumb.jpg" /> Libido, celebrated by Deleuze and Guattari as the great discover from freudian psychoanalysis, a force that involves all the social field and production, triangulated by Oedipus ('father-mommy-me'), but always an impersonal, brutal and powerful matter-energy. All social institutions of heterosexual regime work to capture the libido, they are the territorialising, paranoiac and despotic pole, which was first exposed in Anti-Oedipus. Of course these institutions create a moral, reinforce the norm is to create stability, the holy books, the priests, the churches, all to guarantee the dominion of God (a fiction who, perfectly conscient of his fragility, needs to impose itself as the only reality possible). How to explain, in a system of straight, catholic and human norms, that some people cum when beaten, hanged and rope? That the deconstruction of the body can be pleasurable and orgasmic... don't electrocute them, they will like it! Lyotard talks about a sensuality that resides in senseless, in madness, who are really disconnected from genitality and reproduction, and links that as a product of the deterritorialising pole of capital that Land calls “molecular death”, the desire that “repels the organism”, “a hydraulic tendency to the dissipation of intensities”.3 That intimate relationship between sensuality and death is crucial here, explored with so much effort by Bataille, who established: “What does physical eroticism signify if not a violation of the very being of its practitioners? - a violation bordering on death, bordering on murder?”. It is no coincidence that his novel Story of the Eye, published under the pseudonym Lord Auch, was one of the great symbols of weird sex in fiction, next to 120 Days of Sodom by Sade and Venus in Furs by Masoch, it's the great fictional study on eroticism-libido and death, for so many times crude and graphic. At some point, Marcelle, one of his sexual partners, hanged herself and Bataille (or Lord Auch, the narrator's name is never mentioned in the novel, which leaves room for speculation) have sex next to her corpse, taking Simone's (his other partner) virginity, he describes: “It was very painful for both of us, but we were glad precisely because it was painful. Simone stood up and gazed at the corpse. Marcelle had become a total stranger, and in fact, so had Simone at that moment. I no longer cared at all for either Simone or Marcelle. Even if someone had told me it was I who had just died, I would not even have been astonished, so alien were these events to me.”4 This quote, written with passion and horror at the same time, has more to conceptualise and explains libido better than the best of freudian psychoanalysis make in the last decades, the pleasure does not have any concern with moral, and therefore does not have any concern with being pure, produces boundaries between sex and pain, has nothing to do with persons who are occasionally and casually object of love: impersonal. And it is important to insist on the impersonal aspect of it, because only being impersonal can involve the social field, all production, all societies, and can connect anyone who wants to with your becomings and drives. “I was not even satisfied with the usual debauchery, because the only thing it dirties is debauchery itself, lime and perfectly pure is left intact by it. My kind of debauchery soils not only my body and my thoughts, of course, which merely serves as a backdrop.”5 What really matters is the deconstruction of the body, a means to access death. Here there is no representation, no metaphor, it's not a question of making death “human”, but making us inhuman, deprogram ourselves in order to make a real contact with unknownness (the Outside of body, the Outside of human). That is precisely a schizoanalytical problem: when Deleuze and Guattari analyse the relation of schizoanalysis with politics, they make clear that their creation has nothing to do with political programs or parties, it's about experimentation, libidinal experimentation: “No political program will be elaborated within the framework of schizoanalysis.”6 They don't make that movement to drift away from the problem of a revolutionary practice, but to recreate that practice, not as a unique and messianic road, but as multiplicities infected by desire, to emphasise schizoanalysis as a new way of make contact with the unknown, revolutionary precisely because it doesn’t take revolution as a duty that takes place by the effort of a disciplined and centralised group of militants, but as a surrender to the impersonal forces of libido. “As opposed to Reich, schizoanalysis makes no distinction in nature between political economy and libidinal economy.”7 Lyotard, in the last paragraph of Libidinal Economy, says: “What would be interesting would be to stay put, but quietly seize every chance to function as good intensity conducting bodies.”8. The next chapter of this article will analyse the practices of kink community, the community of the good intensity conducting bodies. The leather dyke comes from the future: a brief study of the body deconstruction&nbsp; practices in kink community <img width="604" height="440" width_o="604" height_o="440" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/58c304dc1d87625377d6b597c08f4e645ca97df6b7520fb52b40f0f414983ca8/samois-handkerchief-codes.png" data-mid="223032374" border="0" data-scale="55" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/604/i/58c304dc1d87625377d6b597c08f4e645ca97df6b7520fb52b40f0f414983ca8/samois-handkerchief-codes.png" /> Dildos, ropes, whips, you don't know what's going to happen to you, and this is more exciting than you've had in your entire life. Foucault calls San Francisco and New York S&amp;M communities “laboratories of sexual experimentation”, for him S&amp;M are “a process of invention” that produces a “desexualisation' of the body. What he means by desexualisation is the same as molecular death drive, the body without organs, a schizophrenisation that repels the organism through rigorous practices, “a remapping of the body's erotic sites, a redistribution of its so-called erogenous zones, a breakup of the erotic monopoly traditionally held by the genitals”.9 Take for this first moment the dildopractice made by Paul B. Preciado after the death of Guillaume Dustan in the chapter Videopenetration from Testo Junkie: a camera, three dildos (9½ x 1½ in; 9¾ x 2½ in; 5½ x ¾ in), testosterone in gel form, a book, a hair cutting machine, a basin with water, a towel, a small mirror, lubricant, hypoallergenic glue, a sheet of white paper, an anal-dilator gel and shaving cream. A brief look, the great part of these things don't look any remotely connected to sex. He put the camera on, shave his hair, make a mustache with hair and glue, apply testosterone, shave his vagina and anus, rubs one of his dildos on the book, and insert two dildos in his orifices, "Looking into the camera again: “This testosterone is for you, this pleasure is for you.” I don’t watch the mini-DV I just filmed. I don’t even number it. I put it into its transparent red case and write on the label: October 3, 2005. day of your death."10 What happened here? Can we call it sex? Masturbation? A tribute? I classify that and other practices as libidinal experiences, it's not only sex that is at stake here, all identity seems to dissolve, plasticity takes place when Preciado turns into Guillaume and there is a boundary between death and life that is broken for a while. Lyotard, based on a quote by Xaviere Lafont, talk about something that is not possible to describe in the sadomasochist experience, “It is a drug”, but is beyond punishment, there is no real punishment in kink practices, better “what succumbs to punishment, with regard to this vertigo, is the illusion of the self”.11 People who are interested in that drug, that thing beyond reason that takes place in these practices, are historically persecuted as we seem, and in order to resists, these people passed through a process of becoming-community, Gayle Rubin classifies that as “the relocation of homoeroticism into these quasi-ethnic, nucleated, sexually constituted communities”12 especially in big cities. Kink groups - at the time “S&amp;M groups” - like Lesbian Sex Mafia, Samois and The Outcasts appeared as centers of decentralised libidinal experimentation, improving and inventing techniques, making such practices survive in face of the moral panic generated by heterosexual society. Kink practices evolve by time for a bunch of reasons, technology, new forms, new practices. These groups engage in efforts to make a “safe” space for people who want to push limits, and it's not because there is a necessity to hygienise or rationalise what is “dirty and irrational”, unlike common sense thinks, these practices require an extreme rigor to take place. Antonin Artaud in order to create his theater of cruelty, was who best established these aspects of rigor in the experimentalist practices.“And philosophically speaking, what indeed is cruelty? From the point of view of the mind, cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.”13 The obsession of kink community with safeness? is more like a rigor with make a real deconstruction and a real exploration than a need to rationalise libido, how offer security - in a strict sense - in practices like genital torture or extremely humiliation? You can't, but an instrumentalisation of certain instruments or practices and a trust between participants (tops and bottoms) can make an environment more open to possibilities of inventing new pleasures, where the artificial boundaries between pleasure and pain are broken in all senses. Again in Testo Junkie, Paul Preciado describes something that he calls “critical reappropriation”,&nbsp; a new form of political agency when the Others take for themselves some practices and products (codes?) from the 'Pharmacopornography regime' and resignifies them, passing through a inhuman-becoming, he says about his experimentations with testosterone: “In this way I become one of the somatic connectives through which power, desire, release, submission, capital, rubbish, and rebellion circulate.” There is a powerful affirmation here, one of a positive dissolution in some processes that make someone capable to intervene in the world, to resignify devices and make them serve to explore through the unknown, but not before being touched by them. Kink communities have done so much work in critical reappropriation, use of dildos, violet wands, military signs, things that are originally part of heteropatriarchal weaponry against the Other are rediscovered in a libidinal sense and used to deprogramming body rather than try to organise him, obviously the libidinal content of these practices exist since their outset, but are hidden behind many layers of normative discourses. Kink, as a navigational space with no commitments to the heterosexual regime, can expose the libidinal economy of all things that are appropriated by it. For a future of inhuman possibilities and pleasures This essay does not have any attempt to exhaust a debate, there are many things to talk about these practices and there will be more day after day, because new practices emerge and new becomings are discovered. Sketching some libidinal economy is always a difficult task, because there is no static and immutable point in libido movements. Kink, as a deterritorialised community, stands as a great threat for heterosexual regime (the territorialising pole), as his bastard son, a result of the large-scale production of Otherness which, like all overproduction, overflows. That's not a matter of organised insurrection against state, parties or something like that, it's a matter of silent, unconscious and asymmetrical rebellion. Starting from accelerationist diagnoses, that “Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.”14, the cosmopolitical war - in his anastrophic front - is about how to engage in the future in his most deterritorialising flows. “Change for the machines. Have you got the right change?”15 In “Orlando, My Political Biography” Preciado talks about a planetary mutation that is taking shape, as the film shows, a planetary mutation that involves many “Orlandos” (the Others). Engaging in the future is first to recognise that the heterosexual regime has been a failed venture in the last decades, sexual dissidents, gender terrorists and nonconforming people are not an exotic group, but a flow of molecular death that infects society. Practices that transform instruments of torture into new pleasures, that make dildos part of new synthetic bodies, that explores animal-becomings with ears, tails and paws, has anticipated not a canceled future, but an imminent post-humanity. “Abolish normality is turn the meaning of 'normal' solely and exclusively in those practices and knowledges that destabilise the integrity of what is offered for us as world and as 'human nature'" writes Cassia Siqueira in her article 'Abolish normality once and for all!” Perhaps there is a kind of optimism here, only time (if it survives) will tell. FOOTNOTES 1 M. Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 28. 2 S. Stryker, M.K. Wark (editor), When Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2024), 140. 3 N. Land. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings (Falmouth and New York:Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2010), 283. 4 G. Bataille. Story of the eye (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1987), 50. (My emphasis). 5 Ibid, 49. 6 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans R. Hurley, M. Seem, H. R. Lane (London: Athlone, 198'I), 380. 7 Ibid, 381. 8 J.-F. Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. l.H. Grant (London: Athlone, 1993), 262. 9 D. M. Halperin. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 88. 10 P. B. Preciado. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in The Pharmacopornographic Era (New York: The Feminist Press, 2013), 20. 11 J.-F. Lyotard, Op. cit., 63. 12 G. S. Rubin, Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 157. 13 A. Artaud, The Theater and Its Double (New York: Grover Press, 1958), 101. 14 N. Land, Op. cit., 443. 15 M. B. Kronic (editor), A. Avanessian (editor). #Accelerate – The Accelerationist Reader (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014), 320. https://xenofuturismmagazine.com/Faux-Expressionism-Simulation-semiotics-and-movement-in-the-digital Sat, 07 Dec 2024 14:53:46 +0000 xenofuturism https://xenofuturismmagazine.com/Faux-Expressionism-Simulation-semiotics-and-movement-in-the-digital Faux Expressionism: Simulation, semiotics and movement in the digital age by Gian Sanghera-Warren <img width="800" height="799" width_o="800" height_o="799" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cb103625029074096c1e94da4bb7fd1ee8ba747d4f570d160aaa63f86aef24c7/IMG_4927-1.jpg" data-mid="223907970" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/800/i/cb103625029074096c1e94da4bb7fd1ee8ba747d4f570d160aaa63f86aef24c7/IMG_4927-1.jpg" /> “I wanted to hypnotise myself with data, with coloured pixels, to become vacant, to overwhelm any creeping sense of who I actually was, to annihilate my feelings … And then again I wanted to declare my presence … I wanted to look and I wanted to be seen, and somehow it was easier to do both via the mediating screen.” – Olivia Laing, The Lonely City. In a viral TikTok from 2022, influencer Julia Carolan suggests “If you want to know how old someone is, but you don’t want to ask them directly, ask them to make a heart with their hands.” Digesting this claim, Frenkel deconstructs the history of heart symbolism, from the symbol devised by a 14th-century physician to the 1990s “heartlike images constructed with letters and numbers” and the modern emoji. The physical gesture of a heart has transitioned in recent years, erasing the use of the thumb for a curved index and extended middle finger. This can be abstracted even further with a one-handed version, inspired by the simple approach of thumb and finger overlapping adopted across many East Asian countries. The distillation of love, from complex emotional and embodied feeling to one initiated from our physical heart is abstract to begin with. Thus, the transition from physical heart to metaphysical heart shape, then recreated as a hand gesture that has evolved across generations and cultures to be performed as a ritual of niche social coding speaks to Baudrillard’s notion of simulation and the eventual fourth stage of pure simulacra. The gesture we are left with feels far removed from the original source and yet resituates love within the body once again, reinventing the primal embodiment of deep emotion in a new abstract form both devoid and filled with meaning. This research interrogates the role of expression within digitised movement through the framework of simulation, post-humanism and semiotics. Reframing doom-scrolling as a form of research, we can analyse and reframe online movement trends, presenting a new era of post-post-modern dance, referred to as Faux Expressionism. Drawing on Baudrillard’s 1981 theory of&nbsp;Simulacra and Simulation&nbsp;and semiotics, perhaps the expressionist trend of representing emotion through movement now exists in a hyper-real landscape where the symbols bear no relation to the meaning they once represented. Embracing the impact of virtuality on embodiment, inspired by the cyborg post-human era described by Haraway and Hayles, Faux Expressionism&nbsp;provides a methodology to embrace the synthesis of the physical and virtual body, whilst fundamentally destabilising the relationship between sign and referent. This work reveals the fallacy that expressive meaning exists behind movement and embraces the hyperreal landscape of pure simulacra that&nbsp;Faux Expressionism&nbsp;provides. Defining Faux Expressionism Faux Expressionism is the movement of a vastly digital age. Rejecting post-modernist pedestrian trends, expressionism is back, but this time it’s fake. In Baudrillardian fashion, the simulation of emotion has become so far removed from the true concept that it bears no relation to the feeling it once represented. Things still make us feel, but in ways we don’t understand. We’re left with a new reality, saturated with heart symbols thrown up like gang signs, TikTok dance trends and carousels of seemingly unrelated images set to a Lana del Rey song. And yet, even in this realm, a trace of the true self remains in the false self. Since the invention and domestication of smartphones, surveillance cameras and motion-cap technology, movement has become increasingly recorded, flattened to the two-dimensional and available for redistribution. In the mid-2000s we Just Danced to Ke$ha in our living rooms, whilst Wii remotes matched our wrist swings to faceless avatars. Dancing became not only a virtual realm but a game, fuelled by the competition inherent to techno-capitalism. The post-modernists of Judson Dance Theatre and friends aimed to strip movement of its emotion. But 60 years after Yvonne said No to moving and being moved, emotion is overwhelming. Split between the extreme highs and lows of the 20teens, Gen-Z and Alpha are prescribed Ritalin and Adderall to tame their 7-second attention spans whilst simultaneously binging on ketamine and blissing out to ASMR vids before bed. Pedestrian movement no longer relates to pedestrian life whilst complete abstraction seems impossible in a time of heightened feelings and infinite symbolism. Every gesture has been memified, every image is referential. Enter Faux Expressionism, minimising Graham’s “hidden language” to a 4:3 ratio. Scrolling on TikTok, movement speaks to current moods more articulately than any sociologist. But even philosophers are made accessible, in videos that girlify the deep dissatisfaction with the modern world that the likes of Foucault and Camus expressed, simultaneously being presented on an app that is the virtual embodiment of the panopticon, the algorithm becoming our greatest prison. Simultaneously it’s our salvation. Touching grass works for some, but nothing makes us feel more seen than a compilation of capybaras being bonked. Movement of the digital age is beyond relatable, it’s transcendent, connecting to inner desires we never knew existed, unearthing esoteric responses that make us feel as if the digital landscape was carved out solely for us, despite the thousands of mutuals commenting “same”. Rationale This text contextualises an embodied physical research on the role of expression within digitised movement and documents the development of a theory, referred to as Faux Expressionism. By collating a vast amount of digitised movement that has entered a personal algorithm over the past year, the expressionist trend of representing emotion through motion seems to be resurfacing online. Rooting this research within a historical evolution of expression within movement, we can draw on and challenge a definition of expressionism that is closely related to the Latin exprimere, which translates as to squeeze out, suggesting that dance conveys “an outward, observable manifestation of inner feelings or thoughts”. Steele claims that the nature of modern dance evolved from the body being confronted by the machine, with choreographers responding to the increasing factories and urban living of the 20th century. Faux Expressionism continues within this lineage of the body being shaped by the machine, examining how movement from the digital age can be adopted to shift our concept of expression. Discussing television, Auslander quotes Marx’s Grundisse, reminding us, "In all forms of society, there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest''. While industrial production may have been the most dominant technological advancement precursing modern dance, our lives and bodies are now shaped by newer technologies. Therefore, digital production should be examined in relation to how it has redefined expressionism, particularly within the context of late-stage techno-capitalism. Whilst we have observed a resurfacing of expressionism online through the prevalence of heart symbol gestures, fancams and viral dance trends, these representations are a form of what Baudrillard defines as simulation: they are purely symbolic images that have no connection to the meaning they relate to. The term Faux Expressionism reinforces that the notion of emotive movement expressing meaning is a fallacy. Instead of being critical of the influx of images devoid of meaning, the potential of this material to reveal something new about the expressive quality of movement within our lives is intriguing. In A Cyborg Manifesto, originally published in 1985 and made available online in 2016, Haraway suggests that whilst we have become “fabricated hybrids of machine and organism”, our machines are “disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert”. Before the invention of the internet, Haraway seemed to predict the increasing expression of our virtual selves and the subsequent eroding of our ‘IRL’ activity. Hayles supports this, arguing that “embodiment has been systematically erased in the cybernetic construction of the posthuman”. Thus, perhaps the increasing distillation of expressive movement to a series of hand gestures and viral dances could reshape how humans experience and convey emotion.&nbsp; Semiotics This research sits within the field of semiotics, whereby scholars aim to uncover the relationship between signs (words, gestures etc.) and the referents (objects, events, feelings etc.) they represent. According to Sebeok: “Human intellectual and social life is based on the production, use, and exchange of signs and representations. When we gesture, talk, write, etc. we are engaged in sign-based representational behaviour, since representational activities vary from culture to culture, the signs people use constitute a mediating template in the worldview they come to have.”&nbsp; Sebeok highlights the ability of signs to communicate meaning between individuals and their culturally specific nature, defining the “symbol” as a sign that stands for its referent in an arbitrary way such as “a V-sign made with the index and middle fingers can stand symbolically for the concept 'victory'”. Barthes refers to the connotations or “‘mythological’ effect” of an image, suggesting that “the analysis of codes perhaps allows an easier and surer historical definition of a society than the analysis of its signifieds.” Without attempting to define virtual society, deconstructing some of the symbols seen within digital culture can investigate what they reveal about how we relate to expression through the simulated body. Simulacra and Simulation Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 treatise Simulacra and Simulation, translated and republished in 1995, claims that all current reality has been replaced with a collection of symbols and signs (simulacra), simulating human reality while erasing contact with the original world. This process is broken down into four stages, the last is where only simulacra exist, bearing no relationship to any original reality. This state, defined as hyperreality, is a “real without origin”, an artificially created world that has begun to erase the original. Nunes suggests that the internet achieves this hyperreality: it “abandons “the real” for the hyperreal by presenting an increasingly real simulation of a comprehensive and comprehensible world.” In Faux Expressionism, the emotive meaning represented by the digital movement we see online ceases to exist and is replaced by imagery itself. This reinforces the “mythic time” of cyborg embodiment, bringing us closer to a society where expression is minimised. In naming Faux Expressionism, we can examine how these new ways of moving reveal more about our current notions of humanity than previous modes of expressionist dance. Curation and Corecore A series of developments have pushed society even further into hyperreality: live-streaming, motion capture technology and the AI industry boom, alongside the surveillance cameras, search engines and self-tracking social media devices that generate daily digital representations of our bodies. In 1995, Nunes writes that “currently, writing is the dominant means of communication on the Internet”. In 2024, movement has a dominant, if not more pervasive presence than words online, with reels and TikToks becoming an everyday vernacular for self-expression. Human bodies and various choreographic materials attempt to convey meaning: slime ASMR content and domestic cooking videos evoke new feelings online. This presence of recorded movement goes against the suggestion of many dance scholars that “performance is defined by its ephemerality” and instead creates a platform where Faux Expressionism is revisited without the temporal confines of the original world. In addition to the expressive choreographic material of digital media, Faux Expressionism can be observed as a curational and compositional tool. The “anti-fad” of corecore is a form of chaos edit, loosely defined as “similar and disparate visual and audio clips that are meant to evoke some form of emotion.” A scroll through the TikTok tag reveals thousands of chaotically edited videos compiled with “no intrinsic meaning” transformed into “something that makes people feel”. Simultaneously, temporality is explored in new ways via digital content, for instance in the trend of sped-up and slowed-down remixes emerging on TikTok. Schmid discusses how “digital technologies are shaping our temporal experience and play a determining part in forming and reconfiguring us to who we are, as digital bodies.” The relentless pace of the virtual world is decelerated into a liminal realm where it can be better explored. These techniques concurrently emphasise and abstract emotion. Conclusion Faux Expressionism provides a framework within which movement and expression can be better understood, a way of processing the ceaseless stream of the choreographic material that digital content consists of. It can also create a playground, a realm in which this mode of expression can be adopted by the live body. The increasing synthesis of our virtual and physical forms means that Faux Expressionism is not contained to the two-dimensionality of our screens. In our cyborg reality, symbols appear in an indistinguishable feedback loop between online feeds and our daily interactions: movement is constantly translated between physical and digital bodies and contexts. This framework brings emotion to the foreground of our experience as content consumers and creators, whilst simultaneously expressing the huge disconnect between our embodied feelings and our language or ability to communicate beyond simulacra. This disconnection rationalises our ability to endlessly scroll through content, and experience the extremes of violence, hope, doom and humour in a way that is both abstract and affecting. In many ways, this disconnection is authentic to the contemporary human experience, and thus Faux Expressionism becomes a useful articulation of how the evolution of hyperspace heavily impacts our relationship to feeling, movement and curation. Situated within the context of cyborg embodiment, simulation and semiotics, Faux Expressionism is a way of viewing the connection between movement and expression as a constantly evolving relationship. As we edge towards a time of hyperreality, the ways in which movement is performed, curated and consumed provide a link to both the historic embodiment of emotion and a path towards the last stage of simulation where meaning ceases to exist entirely. Bibliography Auslander, P. (2011) Liveness: Performance in a mediatized culture. London: Routledge. Barthes, R. (1977) Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana Press.&nbsp; Baudrillard, J. (1995) Simulacra and Simulation. [Online] Translated by Glaser, S. F. Michigan: The University of Michigan Press. Available at: https://0ducks.wordpress.com/wpcontent/uploads/2014/12/simulacra-and-simulation-by-jean-baudrillard.pdf. (Accessed: 25 June 2024). Best, D. (1974) Expression in Movement &amp; the Arts. A &amp; C Black. Carolan, J. (2022) 10 June. Bouncers should start doing this at bars #MadewithKAContest#genz #millenial #handheart #fyp. Available at: https://www.tiktok.com/@juliacarolann/video/7107380364053581098?lang=en&amp;q=Julia%2 0carolan%20heart%20symbol&amp;t=1721051816012 (Accessed: 15 July 2024). Cruz, R., Harding, C. and Sloan, N. (2023) ‘Too Fast? We’re Curious: The sped up remix phenomenon’, Switched on Pop. [Podcast]. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4Oec5c7S8E16qBLpS7btMg?si=e93bcf4d1fb64a22. (Accessed: 21 March 2024). Frenkel, S. (2023) ‘The Changing Online Language of Hearts’, The New York Times [online], 14 February. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/14/technology/heartsemojis-gen-z.html#:~:text=Carolan%20demonstrated%20that%20if%20someone. (Accessed: 20 June 2024) Haraway, D. (2016) A Cyborg Manifesto. [Online]. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Available at: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fictionno wnarrativemediaandtheoryinthe21stcentury/manifestly_haraway_---- _a_cyborg_manifesto_science_technology_and_socialist-feminism_in_the_....pdf. (Accessed: 19 June 2024). Hayles, N.K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press. Laing, O. (2016) The Lonely City: adventures in the art of being alone. New York: Picador. Lupton, D. (2017) ‘Digital Bodies’ in Silk, M., Andrews, D., &amp; Thorpe, H. (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Physical Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 200-209. &nbsp; Nunes, M. (1995) ‘Jean Baudrillard in Cyberspace: Internet, virtuality, and postmodernity’, Style, 29(2), pp. 314–327. Phelan, P. (1993) Unmarked: the politics of performance. London; New York: Routledge. Press-Reynolds, K. (2022) ‘This is corecore (we’re not kidding)’, No Bells, 29 November. Available at: https://nobells.blog/corecore/. (Accessed: 20 June 2024). Sebeok, T. (2001) Signs: An introduction to semiotics. [Online] Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Available at: https://monoskop.org/images/0/07/Sebeok_Thomas_Signs_An_Introduction_to_Semiocs_2 nd_ed_2001.pdf (Accessed: 1 July 2024). Steele, A. (2009) High Technology Dance: The image continuum – dance is meaning and message. LAP Lambert Academic Publishing. Schmid, H. (2017) ‘The Embodiment of Time’, in Broadhurst, S. and Price, S. (eds.) Digital bodies/creativity and technology in the arts and humanities. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 97-111. Townsend, C. (2023) ‘Explaining corecore: How TikTok’s newest trend may be a genuine gen-Z art form’, Mashable, 14 January. Available at: https://mashable.com/article/explaining-corecore-tiktok. (Accessed: 9 June 2024).