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Course Post #8: I’m Humanity by Etsuko Yakushimaru Prepares for Evolution and Mutation

“The sea, the mountain, the wind, the birds, the sky, the stars, and your voice with A and G and C and T, DNA makes who you are a pristine area of land, sea, and sky, a scene from the future you’ve seen before 3, 2, 1, the star of hope, a scene from an evolved future.” - I’m Humanity,  Etsuko Yakushimaru 

With Covid-19 canceling venues and clubs, performers have moved online to sustain themselves. Some have begun to distribute back catalog material on Bandcamp for the sake of charity or to survive. Other artists have hosted streaming sets from their homes to interact with fans. At one of these streams, I saw Haru Nemuri cover I’m Humanity by Etsuko Yakushimaru on a bed with two plaster hearts, an apple, and a cherub statue. The symbolism of these objects can mean a lot of things, but with Covid-19 and Warren Ellis’s Doktor Sleepless the image of pessimistic optimism occurred in my mind. With John Reinhardt’s goal of ending the world as retribution against the Lovecraftian gods that house them as crops.

I’m Humanity by Etsuko Yakushimaru was made in 2017 and won the STARTS prize, an award given to projects that successfully integrated art, science, and technology in social and economic innovation. Yakushimaru’s song was converted into DNA sequences of Synechococcus, which is a type of cyanobacteria. By converting the musical information into a DNA sequence, the musical chords can be recorded and distributed even when humans become extinct. Nevertheless, the song structure remains susceptible to mutation that the lyrics of the song include the lines “stop the evolution-don’t stop it.” This creates a unique posthuman interpretation of the song where the genetic mutation of the DNA sequence could end the original song and diffuse into new song structures that allow new songs and improvisation. Thus, I’m Humanity becomes capable of diffusing itself into a sonic dimension with boundless potential. Moreover, the song could now be distributed in three formats. On CDs the song could last a decade, while on acid-free paper the song could live a century. However, DNA can last for 500,000 years potentially, so Yakushimaru saw great potential in DNA as a recording device.

What’s interesting about I’m Humanity’s distribution mediums is how the song could potentially survive destruction, time, and represent a body. Whether a pandemic or nuclear bomb, Yakushimaru developed a catchy song capable of existing far past civilizations. At the same time, this resembles some of John Reinhardt’s discussion on authenticity and the ways people perform authenticity in part 5 of Doktor Sleepless. Richey Edwards carved 4REAL in his arm to prove the authenticity of himself and his band Manic Street Preachers. Godspeed! Black Emperor or The Stone Roses couldn’t be the bands that represented their eras unless their authenticity seemed real. However, I’m Humanity uses technology to become a posthumanist song swelling in either originality or inorganic modification displaying a complex regard to authenticity. The song’s body becomes a metaphor of how there’s no real authenticity and creativity can evolve and take something into somewhere different like Jean Luc Godard once said “it’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to.” Nevertheless, I’m Humanity becomes distinct for being released on a petri dish alongside other platforms since not many musicians combine biotechnology together with art. Ultimately, as the future treads closely together with us many different paths can intersect and what art and technology can represent remains as wide as possible whether the world continues to sustain or implode.

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Course Post #7: Noise, Violence, and Sonic Expressions in Lingua Ignota

“[the abject] is simply a frontier, a repulsive gift that the Other, having become alter ego, drops so that the "I" does not disappear in it but finds, in that sublime alienation, a forfeited existence.” ― Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

Caption 1: Lingua Ignota performing in the dark.

Caption 2: Lightning Bolt performing, Brian Chippendale uses a modified microphone from an old household phone taped to his mask to process his vocals.

Lingua Ignota is the solo project of Kristin Hayter from Providence, Rhode Island, famous for producing many different noise acts like Lightning Bolt and Daughters. These artists like Lingua Ignota have used noise in a musical context that includes intense and unorthodox musicianship combined with technology and imagery to transform noise into different soundscapes. Some might consider this genre an extension or retreat of punk rock from mainstream appeal or a new dark progressive rock genre. However, Lingua Ignota takes a different route from these other musicians that have channeled noise into a punk or rock ethos. She combines her training as a classically trained pianist and voice, themes of religion and punishment with genres of black metal, noise, and art into the multidisciplinary sonic act called Lingua Ignota. Even her stage name when translated is called “Unknown Language,” and refers to her inspirations from German Christian mystic Hildegard of Bingen and speaking in tongues.

Caption 3: Hildegard of Bingen

With three albums released, Lingua Ignota’s repertoire of sound appears small but her albums demonstrate her fascination with creating a sonic realm close to ambient or soothing like gospel hymns but also confrontational in noise. As an MFA student at Brown University, her thesis was a re-contextualization of texts about domestic abuse and misogyny with musical compositions to create songs for victims of domestic abuse like herself. Her sonic combinations resemble Tripta Chandola’s use of noise in her essay I Wail, Therefore I Am, “the politics of production, performance, and articulation of “noise” as a specific instance of sonic engagement to highlight the broader processes of othering…aims to rehabilitate within the sonic triad of “noise-sound-silence,” wherein sonicity linearly moves from a state of chaos, through certain validations to an absolute state of calm (Chandola 213).” The triad of sound becomes even more evident in her songs that combines hymnal like singing with noise and ambient passages in her songs. Thus, she seeks to not only create songs that have an ethereal and intense, but also unorthodox in approach.

Caption 4: DO YOU DOUBT ME TRAITOR by Lingua Ignota

Hayden’s work on Lingua Ignota is also famous for blending lyrics of violence other phallocentric works into her songs. Her choice in working with misogynistic language and patriarchal systems seek to rework the sonic palettes of extreme music into new forms. At the same time, she chooses to not use feminist theory in her work to also simplify her song’s messages about domestic abuse and survivorship. By combining these grisly words together with her compositions, Hayden hoped to neutralize the phallocentric powers placed in misogynistic language and co-op them into new expressions. As Leandro Minuchin mentions in Noise, Language, and Public Protest: The Cacerolazos in Buenos Aires, “The tensions of sound and space prompt a political temporality that has often been ignored; a sequence if events that situates, in an uninterrupted line…that allow for noise and cacophony to ignite a political process and obtain the consistency of an alternative political language (Minuchin 205).” Even when she uses samples of serial killers like Aileen Wuornos or explores different soundscapes through, these moments change the soundscape of how traditional extreme music has manipulated sound to be edgy. Ultimately, Kristen Hayder’s project Lingua Ignota seeks to explore a new political sonicality that is both intense and vulnerable when listened either recorded or live.

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Course Post #6: Finding Sound in Quiet Spots and Tuning in The World

“Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.” ― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

When reading about sound studies, I began to wonder how much the sound of cities has changed with coronavirus shutting down businesses. Sometimes my nights would be quiet enough for me to concentrate on my assignments which has now made me realize how much the sonic palette of my neighborhood has changed. As mentioned in The Sound-Considered City: A Guide for Decision-Makers by Sarah Lappin, Gascia Ouzounian, and Rachel O’Grady, “Sound can be much more than noise which pollutes. Sound can make a considerable positive impact on how spaces are lived in, worked in and played in for generations to come (36).” Due to this silence perhaps that’s why I found it so eerie and a sign of the odd times mixed some pessimism. Maybe even my attention towards sounds have become amplified now that so many different places have closed like court houses and schools. Despite how much Coronavirus has changed life, I also attempt to hold some positivity in different directions.

With nights becoming so quiet, I have been more interested in hypnagogic pop and ambient music. One night while looking at the description of Kero Kero Bonito’s Time ‘n’ Place in Bandcamp, a part of the description struck a chord with me. “Within the cartography of Time ‘n’ Place, the most important space is the suburbs, an aspect of their shared past that KKB finds infinitely formative. As kids, each member quickly learned the need to invent their own wildness and excitement, embracing misfit status in a place where any form of self-expression could be seen as aberrant.” It reminded me of many of our readings and I began to think about the sound of cities and neighborhoods that have changed a month ago. At the same time, I wondered how people have adjusted in these settings with pessimism mixed with some optimism. Some of these emotions remind me of what Kim Stanley Robinson mentions in Dystopia Now about what to expect after Dystopias, “Dystopia has done its job, it’s old news now, perhaps it’s self-indulgence to stay stuck in that place anymore. Next thought: utopia. Realistic or not, and perhaps especially if not. Besides, it is realistic: things could be better.” Even though this might seem to be something meaningless in the face of a pandemic, perhaps finding something positive from seclusion and introspection is possible. It could also be possible to find these positive moments by inventing them through small steps. Ultimately, the predicaments of today are still working in the square of utopia and dystopia that might jumpstart a new project heading towards a vision somewhat closer to a utopia.

Note: I noticed how spooky the video looks now with the singer Sarah Bonito trying to pass time in a mental heath home.

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Course Post #5: Artificial Intelligence and the Speculative Song of Hatsune Miku

“One has never said better how much "humanism", "normality", "quality of life" were nothing but the vicissitudes of profitability.”

― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

At Coachella 2020 the vocaloid pop idol Hatsune Miku will be performing there for the first time. The vocaloid program was first released in 2000, after failing to make a splash on the market except with other musicians interested in vocal performance. Due to these concerns to reach a wider audience, Yamaha and Crypton Future Media created Hatsune Miku as a mascot to represent their product. As Dunne and Raby writes in Speculative Everything,“The software is the voice behind the imagery (Dunne and Raby 102).” So Hatsune Miku and other vocal synthesizers later released by Crypton Future Media became sensations on the internet as the face of vocal synthesizers. The future of Artificial intelligence reminds me of William Gibson’s novel Idoru where the protagonist falls in love with an AI called Rei Toei.  

Furthermore, speculation of the future of songwriting seems to enter more different areas that intersects between the real and the artificial of the world and speech as music evolves with technology through 808s, MIDI files, and synthesizers. As Dunne and Raby writes in Speculative Everything, “The imaginative use of characters as props can convey ideas, values, and priorities very effectively because of our innate ability to read other people’s facial expression, demeanor, gestures, postures, and orientation (Dunne and Raby 125).” What Dunne and Raby writes about can be seen in the way Vocaloids were originally created as advertisements for software. Now the vocaloids have become icons on the internet with enough popularity to perform on Late Show with David Letterman and Coachella. The idea of an artificial idol performing is a funny idea, but slowly synthesizing AI into real humans is becoming reality.

  An ad agency called space150 created a Travis Scott AI and song without his permission. The song was called “Jack Park Canny Dope Man” and it was made from a database of Travis Scott’s old song lyrics then a music video of Travisbott performing with other CGI women and a sports car was made. Despite their attempts space150’s AI had problems like the bot’s predilection to rap about food. Nevertheless, the ethics of this bot haven’t been explored as a product of an advertisement agency trying to capitalize on a public figure and songwriting. Perhaps this topic has been explored in a Black Mirror episode, but the implications of Travisbott with the real world and the continued development of AI from Hatsune Miku, Rei Toei, and other AIs are fascinating to look at as speculative fiction.

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Course Post #4: Shifting Techno Angst Into Horror

“Trying to maintain my privacy amid all this was just crazy. So I gave up on privacy altogether.” Aunt Tamae. The Town Without Streets by Junji Ito

Beyond Cyberpunk motifs about technocratic futures, the same angst about surveillance and privacy can be seen in horror that elaborates on the destruction of the physical and mental body. The oneshot of The Town Without Streets by Junji Ito demonstrates these types of concern of privacy and how privacy can be acclimated to unsettling changes. The Town Without Streets focused on a high schooler named Saiko escaping to her Aunt Tamae’s town with streets replaced with houses. With no streets, the town required doors and windows of houses unlocked for strangers to walk through. In order to preserve a sense of privacy, citizens wear masks to avoid both people that walk into their houses and the eyes of peepers watching from peepholes in the walls of houses. However, when faced with these obstacles Aunt Tamae goes in a different direction living her life naked and abandoning an exterior privacy and retreating into an internal sense of privacy. Despite her efforts, Aunt Tamae becomes unhinged by the effects of constant surveillance to the point that she threatens Saiko. After she escapes her aunt, Saiko meets the eyes behind the peepholes. The peepers turn out to be multi-eyed monsters from a Lovecraftian dream watching over the humans of the town for whatever reason. Both the metaphor of the town and the peepers predate the development of technological surveillance but continue a legacy of architectural and communal angst. As Jathan Sadowski mentions in his essay Access Denied: Snapshots of Exclusion and Enforcement in The Smart City, “We believe that this dominant abstract presence has the power to reproduce and change our material reality.” The abstract presence today would be the powerhouses on the internet like Google or Facebook, but in Ito’s oneshot the Lovecraftian peepers were the abstract entities of the town. Thus, Junji Ito’s oneshot The Town Without Streets demonstrates a fear of an abstract almost omnipotent presence like Lovecraftian horror or Cyberpunk fiction.

https://papyrust.tumblr.com/image/55055315009

The unusual nature of The Town Without Streets also demonstrates influences from the claustrophobic nature of cities from places like the Kowloon Walled City which could also be traced back into Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City and Le Corbusier’s Radiant City. With Howard and Corbusier, the hope for reform in urban living was an invert to what Kowloon Walled City and Ito’s oneshot showed of rigid urban planning. As Hanna Hurr mentions in her article Panic City about Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City and Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, “reduced human life to a specific set of functions and needs, designated specific locations for each activity, and declared city streets and sidewalks unnecessary for city life.” With the Kowloon Wall City, many works of cyberpunk were influenced by the claustrophobic nature of the city with the noir elements of living near all sorts of people. Junji Ito’s The Town Without Streets also the failure of city planning seeking to articulate human living in a narrow proximity like the Kowloon Walled City. Ultimately, Junji Ito’s The Town Without Streets shows a dream of urban living that turns into a labyrinth of absurdity that not only represents the influence of Lovecraft but also a certain angst resembling the world turned upside down.

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Course Post #3: Seeing and Hearing the Future in Different Tangents

“Only when architect, bricklayer and tenant are a unity, or one and the same person, can we speak of architecture. Everything else is not architecture, but a criminal act which has taken on form.” - Friedrich Hundertwasser, Mould Manifesto against Rationalism in Architecture

The quote mentioned above comes from Austrian painter, environmental activist, and eccentric architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s book Mould Manifesto against Rationalism in Architecture. For Hundertwasser, he was concerned with the future of urban architecture turning into sterile and barren cages without green spaces and mobility. What Hundertwasser mentioned about buildings in his manifesto resembles what Maureen Meadows and Matthijs Kouw mentioned in their essay Future-making: Inclusive Design and Smart Cities, “when involving multiple stakeholder groups, it is important to acknowledge that each group may be concerned about a different set of issues and hold a different and possibly conflicting set of values that could influence their choice of a future.” In order to address his concerns, Hundertwasser tried to develop organic buildings that expressed his sensibilities as a painter and create spaces for trees and people to move freely about. Overall, Hundertwasser’s work demonstrated early concerns for cities gridlocked inside concrete jungles and suffering from climate change.

In the video for Mondo Grosso’s song Labyrinth ft. Hikaru Mitsushima, you see the singer dance through the streets of Hong Kong. The architecture of the city and the streets are labyrinthine and remind me of Hundertwasser's opposition for straight lines. 

I also see some parallels of Hundertwasser’s concerns about rationalization with concerns mentioned by Shannon Mattern in The City is Not a Computer. In her article, Mattern discussed how “contemporary urban discourses, where “data” rhetoric is often frothy and fetishistic, we seem to have lost critical perspective on how urban data become meaningful spatial information or translate into place-based knowledge.” Although Mattern and Hundertwasser would probably hold different views on cities, both likely shared similar views on the need for a critical perspective from the organic side of the city. Even the core message of Ben Green’s book The Smart Enough City also mentions that “Cities don’t need fancy new technology—they need us to ask the right questions, understand the issues that residents face, and think creatively about how to address those problems.” Thus, new rhetoric could help transform cities into new futuristic spaces where the potential for green spaces and quality living could develop without optimizing the world like a computer.

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Course Post #2: Mapping out Cities and Accelerationism in Logorama:

“So, grab a Coke, some Pringles, or a party bucket of KFC and enjoy the show.” -Penelope Bartlett: Programmer at Criterion

If you go to the Criterion Channel, there’s a pairing of short and film together called Brand a Part. The curator of the episode Penelope Bartlett considers both films as a critique on consumer culture. The short film is Logorama by production team H5, an animated feature set in a universe made entirely of logos; while the feature is Masculin Feminin by Jean Luc Godard which focuses on the Parisian youths in the 60s. Although both features are about Capitalism, both wouldn’t be considered in the same genre of posthumanism and transhumanism science fiction that Accelerationism draws upon as examples. However, both films are indicative of the slow Accelerationism of culture that becomes evident through the cinematic techniques. The effects of these cinematic techniques can be seen in the animation of Logorama.

The premise of Logorama is unoriginal, the plot has some of the many action tropes in Hollywood. In exchange for a generic cookie cutter plot, the audience is given the pleasure or humor in seeing the financial and cultural institutions of everyday life become Los Angeles while mapping the city into shapes that elicit the body of the city. This animation captures Accelerationism’s tenants on accelerated capitalism two steps ahead of current reality. Where our shirt logos are burnt into our beings like our naming sense for buildings come from old-moneyed institutions like Wells Fargo or Toyota. Steven Shaviro mentions in No Speed Limit, “...we live in a time when financial mechanisms subsume everything there is.” As the film continues to play out the hostage situation of Ronald MacDonald versus the Michelin police force, Los Angeles crumbles and almost every logo sinks into the sea. By the end, a few logos like the Esso Girl and Bob’s Big Boy survive on a cliff of a North Face logo as the film pans into the logo universe. The ending represents the aesthetics of Accelerationism and the regeneration of Capitalism, as described by Shaviro. “Crises do not endanger the capitalist order; rather, they are occasions for the dramas of “creative destruction” by means of which, phoenix-like, capitalism repeatedly renews itself.” Ultimately, the film shows how capitalism plays into everyday life and regenerates in the face of crisis. 

When analyzing Logorama’s Los Angeles, the selected logos not only create an inventive approach at analyzing an accelerated world but a recreation of a crumbling past as Capitalism accelerates towards the future. As Shannon Mattern mentions in her book Deep Mapping the Media City, the “different tools for record keeping and representation manifest different aspects of that past, including those ineffable qualities that don’t readily lend themselves to “accurate,” standardized formats of representation.” By taking account of the extravagant animation of Logorama, Los Angeles and the unusual characters that inhabit the city stand to represent the more complex structure of city building where everything inexpensive to luxury saturates the same space. At the same time, the inevitable destruction of Los Angeles also represents a future market crash that becomes a end of the world disaster. In the end the film is a romp of Accelerationism masked under the glitter of consumerism and logos.

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Course Post #1: Plastic Love Unwrapped: Media Archaeology of City Pop and Vaporwave

“As Japan’s post-war industrialization came to fruition as a full-on tech boom and the country ascended as an economic powerhouse, city pop emerged as the slick soundtrack for young, moneyed urban dwellers. In a way, this music was designed for all those brand new car-stereo tape decks and Walkmans being developed in Japan at the time, the pristine recordings splashing a touch of neon on the passing skyscrapers... It sounds simultaneously like the future and the past, Japan and America, the shifts of a culture in flux and the fantasy of something far too shiny to be real.”- Jillian Mapes, Senior Editor at Pitchfork

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-pacific-breeze-japanese-city-pop-aor-and-boogie-1976-1986/

The label Light in the Attic released a compilation in 2019 called Pacific Breeze: Japanese City Pop, AOR and Boogie 1976–1986. It was filled with urban Japanese Pop songs from the 70s and 80s meant for an audience living in cities and experiencing the progress of economic growth with great jubilance. Among the characteristics of City Pop was its relation to 80s technology like synthesizers and cassettes; while also embracing Western music like disco, rock, and R&B into the Japanese sound. City Pop not only transformed the Japanese Pop genre but also changed the previous system of codes by remixing Western Pop music and technology into the sound. As described by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun in Crisis, Crisis, Crisis; or, The Temporality of Networks. “Codes, historically linked to rules and laws, seek to exempt us from hurt or injury by establishing norms which order the present and render calculable the future (Chun 139).” These codes faced the crisis of new economic prosperity that revised Japan into a new disjointed state, so the inclusion of modernized Western Pop music codified the crisis and a new system of codes were in place. Thus, popular music was influenced by crises in the world that included world politics, economics, and standards of living.

But City Pop wasn’t popular in the West for several reasons including a lack of inexpensive mediums to distribute music overseas and uncertainty of achieving success in the West. Instead, City Pop songs became relics from an old era in Japan until uploaded to the internet in the early 2010s. During this era of music, many songs like Plastic Love by Mariya Takeuchi earning cult followings on the internet by fans and Vaporwave crate diggers. City Pop and Vaporwave fans reinterpreted the pleasures of Pop classics into artifacts of a lost future alongside purple VHS style visuals loops from old animes and Simpson clips. The emergence of City Pop and old animation loops from an archive on the internet was related to media archeology as Jussi Parikka mentioned in What is Media Archeology?, “the archive- one key institutional ‘site’ of memory…less as a place of history, memory, and power, and more as a dynamic and temporal network, a software environment, and a social platform for memory-but also for remixing (Parikka 15).” Because of the internet, the ghosts of the 80s thought to have rested in peace since the end of one economic era continue to tether to the living. However, these songs and visuals become mutated into forlorn dreams that trail into more questions on different cultural memories like Hypnagogic Pop and Hauntology. With Hypnagogic Pop being an American genre that focuses on the cultural memory of the American 80s while Hauntology was the British relative exploring different sites of cultural memories from the 40s to 70s. Ultimately, City Pop like a lot old music on the internet was part of an archive for relics from an old era reawakened thanks to the advent of both new and old technology coexisting both in the material and ethereal form.