#similarly: ‘the propagation’ is called ‘the swarm’

[labyrynth]

i’ll be honest, the aeon/god concepts in hsr are really fucking cool?

like. take an abstract concept—preservation, abundance, destruction, elation, etc—now dial it up to a thousand percent. congratulations! you now have amoral, enigmatic beings who exist solely to embody their singular aspect—and they will take that aspect as far as they are able to.

it’s really driving home that Divine and Monstrous are not mutually exclusive

[prismart1]

How Does the 3D Activity World Function?

What is Liveliness?

The development is a way pictures are made to appear as flexible pictures. 3D youngster's shows are vivifying a couple of things by using third-layered influences. It gives the energy a veritable and fiery look. It gives such a veritable focus on things that it might be turned and moved. A few moving pictures are even given 360 degrees of versatile components.

History of 3D development

three layered enthusiasm incorporate was first evolved in 1972 and is the world's most memorable PC-created 3D activity. Starting around 1972, animatronics is being used in many spots for educational and clinical purposes. It is even used in designing and arrangement purposes. Following two or three years, vivified movies, anime, and activity makers similarly started using animatronics for the headway of characters.

To make animatronics, it could take from 1 second to a multi-week depending on the idea of the development. This 3d picture energy is made by 3D artists who do three-d development courses. In view of its gigantic unmistakable quality, the three-layered movement course procured a lot of thought and transformed into a well-known course and calling. 3d picture excitement specialists started helping numerous associations and creation houses to make vivification for their animes. 3D liveliness associations started themselves as specialists helping tutoring establishments and facilities for their gatherings and educational adroit classes.

Different Sorts of Activity

The moving pictures are confined to 3D Activity as well as have groupings of enlivenment like Customary, Full, Restricted, Live, Stop-Movement, Rotoscoping, Mud, Pattern, Model, Article, Pixilation, PC Activity, etc

3D action associations started gaining a lot of thought and became renowned among the general population and overall levels. Bit by bit, India started making, and various PC representations studios and associations were started. Likewise, from 1 association to various three-layered richness associations, the expansion was baffled.

The Convenience of 3D Liveliness

3D Activity associations give help the going with things -

Enlightening Purposes - For the most part, individuals will generally review visual substance than words. Along these lines, it is typical to use propagation features for informational purposes. Jazzed-up accounts can satisfactorily chip away at the social events of the understudies and attract out the movements the educational limits of the students.

Redirection - Without a doubt, vitalization is distinctively used in sight and sound and plans. The development is extensively used in movies and animes perhaps the best usage of PC representations. Sight and sound plans are made by a couple of 3D development associations that give an alternate proportion of animes and liveliness series. There are a couple of movies made with invigorating features for youngsters and adults swarm that can be valued as consistent with life films.

Advancement - Taking into account the proportion of action in the notification, they are exceptionally shocking. There are a ton of 3D specialists who can use such a certain level of advanced animatronics for publicizing. Besides making television sees, advanced web sees are furthermore created utilizing three-d enthusiasm studios.

Gaming - Finding a game without three-D energy is near extraordinary; activities are comprehensively used in the gaming industry especially three-layered vitality. The gaming business is totally established on 3D enthusiasm studios. It is an industry where nothing exists without a 3d picture game individual.

These are without a doubt the most comprehensively used components of 3D Liveliness Studio. In India, the 3D movement Studios are extensively used for these components. Taking into account the number of studios one could say that the three-layered Movement is as much used in India as much as far away countries. But the primary moving picture was not used in that frame of mind while nowadays, India isn't backward in that frame of mind of PC representations and giving exceptionally extreme challenges to other 3D energy-using countries. As a general rule, 2D activities are furthermore used at this point the 2D Movements give more smooth and enthusiastic work.

For More Info:-

3d gaming models

organic 3d modeling

[scifigeneration]

Massive astrophysical objects governed by subatomic equation

Quantum mechanics is the branch of physics governing the sometimes-strange behavior of the tiny particles that make up our universe. Equations describing the quantum world are generally confined to the subatomic realm -- the mathematics relevant at very small scales is not relevant at larger scales, and vice versa. However, a surprising new discovery from a Caltech researcher suggests that the Schrödinger Equation -- the fundamental equation of quantum mechanics -- is remarkably useful in describing the long-term evolution of certain astronomical structures.

The work, done by Konstantin Batygin, a Caltech assistant professor of planetary science and Van Nuys Page Scholar, is described in a paper appearing in the March 5 issue of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Massive astronomical objects are frequently encircled by groups of smaller objects that revolve around them, like the planets around the sun. For example, supermassive black holes are orbited by swarms of stars, which are themselves orbited by enormous amounts of rock, ice, and other space debris. Due to gravitational forces, these huge volumes of material form into flat, round disks. These disks, made up of countless individual particles orbiting en masse, can range from the size of the solar system to many light-years across.

Astrophysical disks of material generally do not retain simple circular shapes throughout their lifetimes. Instead, over millions of years, these disks slowly evolve to exhibit large-scale distortions, bending and warping like ripples on a pond. Exactly how these warps emerge and propagate has long puzzled astronomers, and even computer simulations have not offered a definitive answer, as the process is both complex and prohibitively expensive to model directly.

While teaching a Caltech course on planetary physics, Batygin (the theorist behind the proposed existence of Planet Nine) turned to an approximation scheme called perturbation theory to formulate a simple mathematical representation of disk evolution. This approximation, often used by astronomers, is based upon equations developed by the 18th-century mathematicians Joseph-Louis Lagrange and Pierre-Simon Laplace. Within the framework of these equations, the individual particles and pebbles on each particular orbital trajectory are mathematically smeared together. In this way, a disk can be modeled as a series of concentric wires that slowly exchange orbital angular momentum among one another.

As an analogy, in our own solar system one can imagine breaking each planet into pieces and spreading those pieces around the orbit the planet takes around the sun, such that the sun is encircled by a collection of massive rings that interact gravitationally. The vibrations of these rings mirror the actual planetary orbital evolution that unfolds over millions of years, making the approximation quite accurate.

Using this approximation to model disk evolution, however, had unexpected results.

"When we do this with all the material in a disk, we can get more and more meticulous, representing the disk as an ever-larger number of ever-thinner wires," Batygin says. "Eventually, you can approximate the number of wires in the disk to be infinite, which allows you to mathematically blur them together into a continuum. When I did this, astonishingly, the Schrödinger Equation emerged in my calculations."

The Schrödinger Equation is the foundation of quantum mechanics: It describes the non-intuitive behavior of systems at atomic and subatomic scales. One of these non-intuitive behaviors is that subatomic particles actually behave more like waves than like discrete particles -- a phenomenon called wave-particle duality. Batygin's work suggests that large-scale warps in astrophysical disks behave similarly to particles, and the propagation of warps within the disk material can be described by the same mathematics used to describe the behavior of a single quantum particle if it were bouncing back and forth between the inner and outer edges of the disk.

The Schrödinger Equation is well studied, and finding that such a quintessential equation is able to describe the long-term evolution of astrophysical disks should be useful for scientists who model such large-scale phenomena. Additionally, adds Batygin, it is intriguing that two seemingly unrelated branches of physics -- those that represent the largest and the smallest of scales in nature -- can be governed by similar mathematics.

"This discovery is surprising because the Schrödinger Equation is an unlikely formula to arise when looking at distances on the order of light-years," says Batygin. "The equations that are relevant to subatomic physics are generally not relevant to massive, astronomical phenomena. Thus, I was fascinated to find a situation in which an equation that is typically used only for very small systems also works in describing very large systems."

"Fundamentally, the Schrödinger Equation governs the evolution of wave-like disturbances." says Batygin. "In a sense, the waves that represent the warps and lopsidedness of astrophysical disks are not too different from the waves on a vibrating string, which are themselves not too different from the motion of a quantum particle in a box. In retrospect, it seems like an obvious connection, but it's exciting to begin to uncover the mathematical backbone behind this reciprocity."

[diarrheaworldstarhiphop]

Last February, a website called Rave News reported that leading vaporwave producers were gathering in Montreal for an emergency summit to discuss "creeping fascism" in the scene. Vaporwave, an electronic subgenre conceived on the web in the early 2010s, is perhaps best described as post-apocalyptic mall music, with producers like Macintosh Plus and Saint Pepsi (now Skylar Spence) warping muzak, smooth jazz, and dated adult contemporary into airless, warbling soundscapes. It was a progressive-leaning genre that seemed to satirize consumer culture. "I always assumed it was transparent through my work that I leaned left," vaporwave pioneer Ramona Xavier, the woman behind Macintosh Plus, told THUMP.

But now, according to Rave News, vaporwave was mysteriously attracting fascists.

The article's comments section was quickly swarmed by neo-Nazis eager to defend their interest in vaporwave. "The National Socialists who lived in the time of Hitler were big fans of Richard Wagner," one wrote. "But in modern times, it is appropriate for us to turn to modern music." There was just one problem: the report, like everything else on Rave News, was fake news. No anti-fascist meeting of vaporwave artists had actually taken place.

"Our souls are wrapped up in these sounds."—Andrew Anglin, Daily Stormer founder

The point of The Onion-like satire wasn't clear. But knowingly or not, Rave News had hit on a real trend. On SoundCloud and Bandcamp, self-identified fascist musicians really have appropriated vaporwave, along with synthwave, a genre that nostalgically recapitulates the soundtracks of early video games like Sonic the Hedgehog and 80s movies like Blade Runner and Halloween. Today's fascists have stamped synthwave and vaporwave with a swastika and swirled them together to concoct a new electronic music subculture called fashwave (the "fash" stands for "fascism"), and another related microgenre called Trumpwave. The aesthetic of both might be summed up as Triumph of the Will on a Tron grid.

Fashwave is almost entirely instrumental, and wholly unoriginal. If it weren't for the jarring track titles—"Demographic Decline," "Team White," "Death to Traitors," to cite a few by fashwave artist Xurious—you might not be able to tell the difference between fashwave and the microgenres from which it draws inspiration. Occasionally, though, a track will interrupt its celestial synth atmospherics or arcade-like 8-bit bloops with a sample of Adolf Hitler ranting at a rally, or President Trump's speeches spliced together to make him boom, "The heroes are those who kill Jews!" The effect is a hammy nightmare—think Jane Fonda leading one of her 80s exercise routines at a Nuremberg rally.

Fashwave has become propaganda for the neo-fascist movement known as the "alt-right," a term that originated on America's far-right fringe in the early 2010s. Proponents of the loosely configured movement tend to reject "political correctness," trade, immigration, Islam, feminism, the left, "globalism," and establishment conservatism—which are also more or less the targets of Trump and, after his takeover, much of the Republican Party. Like fascism through the decades, the alt-right is shot through with contradictions; many of its followers disavow racism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism. But its underlying motive is still that of the fringe from which it sprang: white ethno-nationalism and authoritarianism.

With Trump's election and the spread of far-right parties in Europe, the alt-right is on the ascent. Like its Nazi and Italian fascist forerunners, it wants to infiltrate and remake popular culture. And fashwave—with its sonically inoffensive, largely lyric-free instrumentals—is the first fascist music that is easy enough on the ears to have mainstream appeal.

On 4chan's /pol/, the web's unofficial alt-right headquarters, posters talk frankly of fashwave as a "trap to make our ideas seem friendly and approachable," as one user wrote. Another warned that the slogans on fashwave-related art work needed to be softened for wider consumption: "Careful guys, the phrase needs to be oblique and vague, not direct 'GAS THE KIKES' /pol/ memes. Try some subtlety."

"I think it's great that we have our own culture, even if it's small."—alt-right leader Richard Spencer

With its tinny musical quality and tiny scope, however, fashwave is a long way from exuding any real cultural power, and might flame out any day. Until Buzzfeed brought the music into mainstream awareness with an article in December, it was virtually unknown beyond alt-right circles. There are only a handful of major fashwave artists, and they're not headlining any fascist raves or military parades. Instead, they're toiling in the internet's depths, getting a few thousand listens for every track. Leading fashwave producer Cyber Nazi's two biggest hits, "Right Wing Death Squads" and "Galactic Lebensraum," cracked 50,000 YouTube views—respectable, but hardly a cultural Reichstag fire.

Still, the alt-right's gatekeepers have adopted fashwave as the movement's signature sound. Black Sun Radio, an online neo-Nazi station, is saturated with both fashwave and non-fascist synthwave. Andrew Anglin, founder of leading neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer, last year christened synthwave the "soundtrack of the alt-right," praising it as "the Whitest music ever [sic]" for its ostensible lack of African rhythmic influence. He posts a recurring feature called "Fashwave Fridays," which includes a synthwave playlist alongside typical synthwave imagery, like 80s women in bright spandex and retro sports cars. "The music is the spirit of the childhoods of millennials," Anglin wrote on the Daily Stormer. "Our souls are wrapped up in these sounds."

Over the phone with THUMP, Richard Spencer—president of white nationalist group the National Policy Institute, and widely regarded as the inventor of the term "alt-right"—said he loves fashwave. "Sometimes when I'm doing business, busy-work, I'll just flip on Xurious or Cyber Nazi on SoundCloud or YouTube and just listen to it," the white supremacist writer and publisher, who sports a Third Reich-reminiscent "fashy" haircut, said. "I think it's great that we have our own culture, even if it's small." (Spencer recently became a national meme when he was punched in the face by an anarchist while giving an interview to ABC News, footage of which has been set to different popular songs, including "Sandstorm," and which gave rise to the hashtag #punchanazi.)

Spencer has incorporated fashwave aeshthetics into the alt-right's branding. In November, at a National Policy Institute conference in Washington where Xurious was a musical guest, Spencer unveiled a logo for the movement. Its geometric "A" and "R," cast against a starry sky, looked like letters from an alien language, and over the mic, Spencer said the design was inspired by "synthwave nostalgia."

Fashwave's visuals, circulated on Twitter and 4chan, are just as essential as its music. Typical vaporwave pop-art—such as Windows 95 logos, Japanese characters, and Greco-Roman statues sprinkled on pastel or neon backgrounds—mingles with Nazi iconography, like Hitler in a Hawaiian shirt. At the same time, the neon-lit cityscapes of synthwave visuals are populated with red-eyed cyborg death squads.

In an email to THUMP, Cyber Nazi proclaimed fashwave to be the "direct heir" of Futurism, the 1910s avant-garde art movement that hitched itself to Italian fascism. The Futurists gloried in technological advances such as trains, automobiles, and electric light, as well as the violence of heavy industry and war. Similarly, "We have the internet and computers," Cyber Nazi wrote. Viewed a certain way, fashwave does reflect a kind of present-day Futurist project: a global cybernetic subculture geared towards millennials, propagated by memes like Pepe the Frog, and centered on sites like 4chan and the new Twitter alternative, Gab. In synthwave and vaporwave—genres born, like the alt-right, largely on the internet—the movement has found a natural fit.

Meanwhile, fashwave fans have cast aside punk, folk, and metal—music traditions with long histories of being appropriated as vehicles for far-right ideology—as relics. "It's impossible to build anything with [those] old and expired genres," Cyber Nazi told THUMP. "We are young people who have nothing to do with the skin heads gangs, hoolingans or kkk masons. [sic]" This disavowal, however, doesn't mean fashwave represents a friendlier fascism; in an interview on Right Stuff Radio, Cyber Nazi casually mentioned his hatred of "niggers" and "sand-niggers."

Vaporwave and synthwave aren't the first electronic music genres to be appropriated by fascists, either. In fact, they're just the latest iteration in a long history of co-opted machine-made sounds, one with roots in the early 20th century.

"It's impossible to build anything with old and expired genres"—fashwave producer Cyber Nazi

Back in the 1910s, Futurist thinker Luigi Russolo called for an explosive "art of noises" for the industrial age, and in the 1970s, early industrial and noise musicians consciously rose to the challenge. According to Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music by S. Alexander Reed, pioneers like Spahn Ranch, Nurse with Wound, and Pornotanz aimed to critique society's invisible totalitarianism by conjuring it as violent noise. However, industrial music's nihilistic outlook and martial overtones—including its use of fascist symbolism and regalia for shock value—also attracted neo-Nazi fans. An example of what Reed calls industrial's "often intentional language of ambiguity" can be found in Laibach, a leather-clad Slovenian group whose name refers to the Nazis' term for their occupation of Slovenia. The group has embodied a vaguely Stalinist aesthetic since the 80s so convincingly that North Korea welcomed them to Pyongyang in 2015.

As industrial music was emerging in the 70s, Kraftwerk was busy in Germany laying the groundwork for electronic pop music. The group always insisted that their artistic vision of a dawning cybernetic age was a continuation of the radical modernism of 1920s Weimar Germany rather than a homage to the Nazi era. But Kraftwerk's automaton-like presence recalled soldiers marching in lockstep, and the cover of their 1975 album, Radio-Activity, pictured a Nazi radio set called the Volksempfänger. That tension led Genosavior, one of the scene's artists, to praise Kraftwerk on Twitter as an "Early #FashWave prototype." One alt-right meme even rechristens them "Fashwerk."

https://soundcloud.com/user-625608547/team-white-free-download

Spencer, for his part, says his favorite bands are Depeche Mode and New Order—two groups that are practically synonymous with the 80s, the decade in which the alt-right bigwig grew up. But unlike most other fans, he sees a fascist sheen on the icy synth plains of the New Wave music they pioneered. Upon surface inspection, you can see where he might have gotten the idea. According to a biography of the band, New Order traced its name to a stray phrase from the Situationists, a postwar French art collective of anti-authoritarian Marxists. But "New Order" was also Hitler's term for his program of world domination. The band's earlier iteration, Joy Division, borrowed its name from brothels in the concentration camps, in addition to putting a drawing of a Hitler Youth drummer on the cover of its 1978 debut EP, An Ideal for Living. To the band's dismay, plenty of skinheads misunderstood where the band was coming from, and showed up at Joy Division's concerts.

Over the phone with THUMP, Spencer said he thought New Order and the New Wave bands that took after them "were consciously or unconsciously channeling... something darker, more serious, maybe more authoritarian."

At least with New Order, he's right, although it's complicated. On the one hand, the band was critiquing fascism as a growing menace in a late-70s Britain where imperial decline and industrial decay had radicalized a stagnated white working-class (sound familiar?). On the other hand, as Simon Reynolds recounts in his 2006 history Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, singer Bernard Sumner "enthused about the beauty (the art, architecture, design, even uniforms) that emerged despite 'all that hate and all that dominance.'" Fellow member Peter Hook, writes Reynolds, admitted to the dark allure of flirting with fascist aesthetics. "We thought it was a very, very strong feeling," Hook said.

That guilty fascist charge, so acutely felt by New Order in the 70s and 80s, now flows shamelessly through the alt-right, finding full expression in fashwave.

"By connecting an easily digestible message to the soundtrack of our youth, the alt-right seeks to subvert our critical thinking and directly appeal to our emotional selves."—Stefanie Franciotti AKA Sleep ∞ Over

But fashwave taps into still another lineage in the history of modern music—that of vaporwave's raw material, muzak, which in turn is haunted by the specter of fascism.

In September 1934, the National Fascist Militia Band, an Italian brass band created by Benito Mussolini, entered the New York studios of the newly formed Muzak corporation and recorded one of the first-ever sessions of muzak. There were 25 songs in the set, including an Italian ditty called "March on Rome (Anthem for a Young Fascist)" and America's own "The Star-Spangled Banner." The Muzak corporation piped the National Fascist Militia Band's tunes into hotel lobbies, restaurants, and homes under a sanitized alias: "The Pan-American Brass Band."

The Muzak corporation wasn't a fascist outfit itself, but its use of canned easy-listening music to spur on shoppers and workers had stark martial origins. Its founder, Major General George Owen Squier, was America's chief signal officer during World War I, responsible for the military's communications network. The company's patented "stimulus progression"—playlists calibrated to maintain workers' energy levels and morale through the day—first came into wide commercial use during WWII in armaments factories. According to Elevator Music: A Surreal History, by its heyday in the 1960s and 70s, muzak was everywhere: trickling out of megaphones at a Nixon inauguration, calming cattle in slaughterhouses and astronauts on their way to the moon, keeping missile operators awake and alert in underground nuclear silos. As if winking at the critics who called muzak (a portmanteau of Kodak and music) an instrument of societal control, the Muzak corporation branded itself a "System of Security for the '70s," as well as "The Total Communications System."

By 2009, following the economic crash, the Muzak corporation went bankrupt. (It was eventually bought out, renamed, and revived, and now creates customized playlists of pre-existing songs for store branding.) Around the same time, left-leaning experimental electronic artists like Daniel Lopatin, James Ferraro, and Ramona Xavier began plumbing all the bland sonic ambience of capitalism, including muzak and largely forgotten pop and smooth jazz numbers, resulting in what would later be known as vaporwave.

Lopatin, best known for his work as Oneohtrix Point Never, looped and slowed down bits of old pop songs for a 2009 compilation called Eccojams Vol. 1, released under the alias Chuck Person. Ramona Xavier's 2011 album Floral Shoppe distorted 80s pop and old smooth jazz, and her retro net-art aesthetic, presented as kitsch, has a become canonical vaporwave signifier, extended and reinterpreted by later acts like 2 8 1 4 and Death's Dynamic Shroud.wmv. James Ferraro's Far Side Virtual, released the same year, assembled cheap MIDI presets, the Skype login sound, and other bits of pointedly contemporary digital detritus into a gratingly cheery faux-muzak orchestra. While the project's absurdly gleeful tone leaves it unclear whether Ferraro's vision of life in the digital age is utopian, dystopian, or neither, that ambiguity and perhaps ambivalence has persisted in the music of the vaporwave scene he helped inspire.

In a 2011 essay that helped define the genre, Adam Harper asked: "Is [vaporwave] a critique of capitalism or a capitulation to it?" "Both and neither," he continued. "These musicians can be read as sarcastic anti-capitalists revealing the lies and slippages of modern techno-culture and its representations, or as its willing facilitators, shivering with delight upon each new wave of delicious sound."

The development of vaporwave ran parallel to that of synthwave, which emerged in the mid-2000s, rebooting the synthy 80s film scores by composers like John Carpenter, Vangelis, and Tangerine Dream. Within the past two years, the semi-ironic nostalgia of synthwave and vaporwave has outgrown its subcultural roots and seeped into the mainstream—a process exemplified by MTV's use of vaporwave in branding, and the popularity of the soundtrack to hit Neflix series Stranger Things, by Austin synthwave group S U R V I V E.

At the same time, fascists have flipped this retromania around, collapsing the ironic distance into a vortex of nostalgia for the worst elements of the Reagan era. According to Spencer, the alt-right's fascination with the 80s stems from looking back on the decade "as halcyon days, as the last days of white America." Fashwave, then, directly links pop culture's generalized 80s nostalgia to the alt-right's racist ideology. The "one connecting factor" of white nationalism, an alt-rightist declared on Twitter, is "a belief in the supremacy of the 1980s. This is the goal."

A vaporwave video by satirical artist Mike Diva

Stefanie Franciotti, who records under the alias Sleep ∞ Over, emerged from the same Austin-based, synthesizer-centric scene as S U R V I V E. She is decidedly anti-fascist, and described fashwave to THUMP as "weaponized nostalgia.

"By connecting an easily digestible message to the soundtrack of our youth," she said, "the alt-right seeks to subvert our critical thinking and directly appeal to our emotional selves."

Today, arguably, the 80s are back, but with a few modifications. The Reagan rictus smile has slumped into a scowl, and the Shining City on a Hill is to be ringed by a great wall. At the center of it all is Trump, a living time-capsule of 80s capitalist excess and garishness, and thus the ideal subject for fashwave. In "Trumpwave," a track by the synthwave artist iamMANOLIS is annexed to play over footage of a younger Trump wrestling at WWE, hitting on women, and eating stuffed-crust for a Pizza Hut commercial. Below the video, a YouTube commenter wrote: "When you see all these older videos it all makes sense. It's not that Trump is weird and we're going towards some parody of a society, it's that we already live in a parody. Trump is bringing back the sanity of the good old days." Another wrote simply: "The Donald is here. I feel the capitalism! <3 "

"Trumpwave" is an exemplar of the genre by the same name. Trumpwave shares an alt-right audience and at least one producer—Cyber Nazi—with fashwave. But the fashwave off-shoot is distinct in appropriating mainly vaporwave, and in its emphasis, through both sampled audio and video clips, on The Donald himself. In Trumpwave, he is recast as the modern-day inheritor of the mythologized 80s, a decade that is taken to stand for racial purity and unleashed capitalism. "Ivanka Vaporwave," a production by an alt-right YouTube channel, slows down the Cosmat Angels' 1985 "I'm Falling" over old clips of Trump's daughter Ivanka modeling as a young teenager. Cyber Nazi's "Take Back Our Future" rolls light muzak over stock footage of early 90s New York on a sunny day and Trump awkwardly dancing on Saturday Night Live.

Trumpwave exploits a vulnerability in vaporwave: its ambivalence about the cultural detritus that inspired it. This careful tension between irony and earnestness was part of what made vaporwave fun—it flirted with the implicit transgressiveness of appreciating its aggressively commercial source material. But that ambiguity left the aesthetic distressingly easy for the alt-right to appropriate by stripping it of irony and playfulness—by taking it literally, as a glorification of capitalism. Similarly, when synthwave artists exhumed 80s movies like Blade Runner, Robocop, and Terminator, they also dressed the music in the decade's fatalist retrofuturism. A glance at the album art of Cyber Nazi—with its jackbooted cyborg cops going door to door—shows how for fascists, this dystopia is utopia. Extrapolating from the 80s, fashwave embraces that decade's grim sci-fi forecasts as paradise.

There's nothing inherently fascist about any sound—everything is context. But the deployment of vaporwave and synthwave by the alt-right proves that fascism has survived the defeat of the Axis, incubating its own culture even as it lost all political power. New Order, Kraftwerk, and many others traced an enduring fascination with fascist aesthetics. Meanwhile, neo-Nazi subcultures thrived in the shadows of genres like industrial, punk, metal, and trance. Fashwave is just the most recent in a long line of fascist appropriations, stretching beyond music: the Nazi swastika is, of course, a literal inversion of a Buddhist symbol. But unlike other genres, fashwave arrives at a time when fascism itself is surging to global power for the first time since the 30s, and both its music and visuals can seem like a premonition of the future. Refracting a nostalgia for the 80s and a love of capitalism through the prism of Trump, fashave projects an image of a looming dystopia, one that grows a little more plausible by the day.

[awesomeblockchain]

Every Monday morning, artnet News brings you The Gray Market. The column decodes important stories from the previous week-and offers unparalleled insight into the inner workings of the art industry in the process.

This week, dissecting one subject to put an entire system in view...

Maecenas logo. Image courtesy of Maecenas.

EXECUTION STYLE

On Wednesday, art investment startup Maecenas opened online registration to participate in an event it is billing as -the world's first ever blockchain-based auction of fine art." But in my opinion, slicing into the details lays bare a number of deficiencies that also apply to much of the overheated art and blockchain space. (If you're not familiar with that space yet, check out my primer from earlier this year.)

Presented in partnership with Dadiani Syndicate, which brands itself as the first British gallery to accept cryptocurrency payments, the Maecenas auction in question will feature only one work: Andy Warhol's 14 Small Electric Chairs (1980). The painting will be divided into fractional shares collectively amounting to as much as a 49 percent ownership stake. These minority shares will be distributed to winning bidders paying in Bitcoin, Ether, or Maecenas's own cryptocurrency, the ART token. Sale and subsequent Wall Street-style trading of these shares will be tracked on a blockchain, allegedly creating what Maecenas calls a -transparent marketplace."

To Maecenas and Dadiani's credit, would-be bidders can only participate in the auction after submitting some basic -Know Your Client" and -Anti-Money Laundering" details, including proof of identity and current residence. In theory, this requirement at least prevents the auction from being converted into a washing machine for dirty cash-a legitimate possibility that dogs many crypto-ventures seeking an air of legitimacy and wider adoption.

But what about Maecenas's stated mission to -democratize access to fine art" via the Warhol auction and others like it? Does the blockchain element deliver the revolutionary promises central to the startup? And what do the answers tell us about the many other art/blockchain ventures swarming the industry like fruit flies to a poorly maintained winery?

Infographic on registration for Maecenas's first-ever blockchain-based art auction. Image courtesy of Maecenas.

THE PROPOSITION

In its white paper, Maecenas identifies the -fundamental issues of art investment" as -lack of transparency, lack of liquidity, and most importantly the fact that trust is centralized" with traditional entities like auction houses and galleries. (For the uninitiated, the masterminds behind every crypto-venture, including Bitcoin, write a white paper to detail their product, their goal, and how the former achieves the latter.)

By this logic, Maecenas magic-wands the industry by dividing artworks like 14 Small Electric Chairs into tradeable shares, then facilitating and tracking their movements via blockchain technology.

It's an appealing idea if you want to invest in art but can't afford a collection, right? Allow more people to buy in by lowering the cost of entry, and place the responsibility for monitoring the marketplace into the hands of infallible, incorruptible software rather than fallible, corruptible human experts.

However, in my opinion, this pitch represents a dramatic misunderstanding of blockchain-one that helps propagate myths about the technology that are driving the gold rush of misguided crypto-art startups.

REALITY CHECK

When people like me try to define the concept of a blockchain to the uninitiated, we almost inevitably fall back on some variant of the phrase -decentralized digital ledger." Once you explain that -decentralized" means -jointly maintained by different computers in different locations with different owners," this definition usually helps.

Why? Because a ledger, or an ongoing list of transactions, is a pretty relatable idea. People might picture an Excel spreadsheet tracking expenses or an itemized receipt from a grocery store. Simple, right?

The problem is that these images are somewhat misleading. It's true that a well-written blockchain tracks all the details of whatever transactional history it's recording. But it's false that the info is easy to read if you're just a skeptical customer without some hardcore software literacy.

A crucial point often lost in the analysis of many blockchain art ventures, and many blockchain ventures, period, is this: There is nothing inherently transparent about blockchains. Not all of their data is publicly viewable by default. The creator has some power to choose what to make visible, and who to make it visible to.

Although I didn't find the mechanism detailed in Maecenas's white paper, let's just assume that their blockchains will all provide maximum data visibility to investors. Otherwise, all the company's rhetoric about -democratizing access" and using an -open blockchain platform" would be nothing but chemtrails.

The larger, more important issue is that even an accessible blockchain is hard to review. It's not as if every one of them automatically generates a link to an easily readable table of transactions like the old school examples I mentioned above. The only way to check for accuracy is to do an independent audit of the blockchain at the level of code.

To give you a sense of what that task requires, take a look at the below excerpt from crypto-skeptic Kai Stinchcombe's essential essay -Blockchain Technology Is Not Only Crappy Technology But a Bad Vision of the Future." Here, he's talking about the alleged revolutionary potential of using blockchains to create truly free and fair elections in developing countries.

-Keep your voting records in a tamper-proof repository not owned by anyone" sounds right - yet is your Afghan villager going to download the blockchain from a broadcast node and decrypt the Merkle root from his Linux command line to independently verify that his vote has been counted?

If your response to the above was -WTF does any of that mean?" that's the point! Even a sharp citizen will be almost powerless on their own in this realm without a pretty rigorous coding background. Unless we're all intent on turning ourselves into characters from Mr. Robot, this is kind of a problem.

So what is the average person likely to do in a blockchain ecosystem instead? As Stinchcombe writes, probably something like -rely on the mobile app of a trusted third party - like the nonprofit or open-source consortium administering the election or providing the software."

In other words, any non-hacker buying into blockchain is just choosing to trust software rather than a person or traditional institution. But since software doesn't magically write itself, -trusting in the software" on some level means -trusting in the people writing the software." And unless you subscribe to some fringe Silicon Valley cosmology in which programmers are numbered among the saints, there is no reason to believe that people writing software are inherently more trustworthy than people working at auction houses or galleries. And that matters whether you're investing in fractional shares or hoping for bulletproof provenance verification.

THE TRUST PROBLEM

This leads us back to Maecenas's Warhol offer. In order to feel good about bidding in a crypto-denominated, smart-contract-activated, blockchain-tracked auction, you first have to trust that:

The artwork is authentic.

The owner is the true owner.

There are no other liens or ownership stakes against it behind the scenes.

The software has been written fairly and securely (again, unless you're willing and able to audit it yourself), and...

The certificate verifying your fractional shares in the painting is enforceable off the blockchain (meaning IRL).

About that last part: Maecenas's legal and compliance regime is not outlined in its white paper, either. Instead, you get a grand total of six sentences and one confusing diagram on page 10 that I would argue collectively amount to -just trust us, OK?"

In fact, despite the overtures made to -decentralized networks of trust" and the exclusionary inefficiencies of the traditional art industry, reliance on established art-world and business-world institutions runs rampant through Maecenas's pitch.

Their home page states that -Artworks remain in custody of trusted institutions, vetted collectors, and galleries." (The particulars of this vetting process are not detailed.) Similarly, both nearby and within the diagram I just mentioned, you'll find references to Maecenas's involvement with -art finance experts, law firms, and investment professionals," as well as unidentified -art experts" who verify every artwork's authenticity.

And as the diagram makes clear, guess who's standing at the (ahem) center of all these different traditional experts? Maecenas! Kind of odd for a business using decentralization as a pillar of its mission, no?

This points us toward something that needs to be said more broadly about blockchain ventures and their promises of decentralized disruption of the art market.

Mockup of the Maecenas trading platform. Image courtesy of Maecenas.

THE -PLATFORM" PROBLEM

Maecenas defines itself as a -platform," a word as pervasive in art/blockchain pitches as sad animals in budget petting zoos. Why is this a practical problem rather than a verbal annoyance? Because -platform" is a synonym for -middleman," and middlemen are inherently contradictory to any sincere effort to decentralize anything-at least, if they're charging a fee for their presence at the crossroads.

Maecenas is a perfect example of this. Their white paper states that they charge the consignor of any artwork a six percent listing fee and successful bidders on fractional shares a two percent transaction fee. (Fractional owners are allowed to sell their shares commission-free.)

Unless you've recently been slammed in the head with a frying pan, I can't really give you a pass for preaching the virtues of decentralization while simultaneously pitching yourself as a -platform" for transactions that takes a 2 percent to 6 percent cut. It's internally inconsistent. It's like saying, -I love nature, but I'm not wild about plants."

This brings us to another sirens-blaring, red-alert point about the big picture: Blockchain is a decentralized technology that can still be put toward centralized uses. It's no different than the argument you'll hear made about wedding rings by men living in the cesspool that is the pick-up artist -community": Wearing one can be just as useful for attracting extramarital action as for signaling that you're off limits.

In tech itself, there is no better example of this reality than the web itself. A technology developed to facilitate the free and fair exchange of knowledge without exposure to filters, discrimination, or tracking has today been transformed by various -platforms" into the most aggressive and extensive advertising, monetization, and mass surveillance apparatus in human history.

Say it with me: Technology is agnostic. Its effects depend on the people using it.

Which begs the question: What do the people behind Maecenas and the Warhol auction actually want?

The American artist and filmmaker Andy Warhol with his paintings(1928 - 1987), December 15, 1980. (Photo by Susan Greenwood / Liaison Agency)

WILL THE REAL MAECENAS PLEASE STAND UP?

Maecenas's press releases and white paper alternate between two stated goals. One is to democratize access to fine art. The other is to democratize access to fine-art investment. Yet these are wildly different objectives, and the -platform" looks much more tailored to one than the other.

This is apparent even in Maecenas's name. Early in the white paper, they explain their choice of moniker as follows:

We are named after-and inspired by-an early patron of the arts. Gaius Maecenas helped democratize art in Ancient Rome by financing poor poets. We want to be the modern version of Maecenas... ensuring that fine art is available to everyone and not just the ultra-wealthy.

So how does this gel with auctioning off fractional shares in a select group of artworks that, according to the white paper, -will be kept in purpose-built safe art storage facilities" at freeports?

The answer is that -Maecenas, in its effort to democratize access to fine art, will allow investors and their nominated guests to arrange visits to appreciate the artworks" if they're ready to travel somewhere like Singapore, Luxembourg, Geneva, or New York.

Invoking Maecenas, the Roman arts benefactor, would make sense if Maecenas, the -platform," was actually, say, a crowdfunding venture that funneled money to working artists experiencing extreme financial hardship. Or, alternatively, if the historical Maecenas's arts -patronage" had consisted of building a private library of poems where the rights to individual lines or stanzas could be traded in the square, but only read by investors also willing to make an in-person journey to the archive.

But neither of those is true, so the name is ridiculous. To me, it misses the point almost as badly as if someone built a -platform" to invest in the worldwide expansion of British commerce and called it Gandhi.

SUMMING UP

I have a lot of other, smaller questions about both the Warhol auction and Maecenas more broadly. But the key point is that I don't see how blockchain technology actually solves the issues they want it to. For instance, other startups elsewhere in the world have managed to market fractional shares without blockchains. And if the goal is to make art investing more like investing in the traditional financial markets, well, it's not as if the likes of E-Trade, Schwab, or Robinhood needed decentralized technology to thrive.

Instead, Maecenas looks to me like a standard-bearer for so many of the art/blockchain ventures bombarding the industry: a monetization strategy with little genuine interest in art or artists, and no real solutions to the problems it's pursuing. I don't think they're evil, just misguided. But if we want this technology to make any significant changes in a troubled ecosystem, we have to keep asking hard questions about its true limitations and potential.

That's all for this week. 'Til next time, say what you mean, and mean what you say.

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[curlyhalo-by-kimberlyelise]

  I’ve come to Free Yoga on the Bluff for nearly a decade, and still, watching the swarm of strangers arrive to this infamous spot beneath the trees is heart-stirring. Today is particularly crowded; but I snag a shaded spot in-between a man, no younger than 75, and a teenage girl. She sits huddled in a circle with friends. They wear their hair in similarly polished buns, and I decide they must be ballerinas. The grey-haired man lies back on his yoga mat, staring up at the dancing leaves. I lower onto my knees, and drop my head between outstretched arms, in a child’s pose. The world around me quiets, and the sound of my own breathing becomes apparent. A light breeze rises up over the bluff. I’m immediately grateful I thought to bring a sweater, despite the sunny day.

By: Yessenia Morena

The crowd is dense with conversation, a sudden lull. I look up and see our yoga teacher, Dharma Shakti, has arrived. She is wheeling a large speaker onto the grass, gracefully greeting those who ask for her attention as she passes. It’s been ten years, and still, after all this time, I come to this quiet place in the city because I know Dharma will help guide me to a part of myself I can’t catch alone. A part of me a bit softer, and less guarded. I imagine everyone is here for a similar reason. The microphone turns on and Dharma greets the crowd of eager faces, welcoming them to Yogalution.

It’s rare yoga teacher and yoga student find union outside of the class setting. But after many years of honoring these roles, Dharma and I sat down for a conversation as peers. We spoke about everything from the yogic philosophy, to business ownership, and what’s in the works for the future of the Yogalution Movement. Read my conversation with Dharma Shakti, owner of Yogalution Movement and Ayurveda here.

Q: Yogalution is the name for both Free Yoga on the Bluff as well as your donation-based studio. What does the name mean? 

The word yogalution is a blend of words- yoga and revolution. I use to say yoga was the real revolution the world was seeking, or thirsty for. Through the science, practice and philosophy of yoga, then one person, one class at a time, we could revolutionize our neighborhoods, our communities, our city, and ultimately, the broader world at large! So one day my husband said to me, “you should call it yogalution- the yoga revolution.” I wanted to revolutionize mainstream, American yoga back to its roots, Spiritual Yoga, so it just worked.

Q: As you often share in class, Yoga is a sanskrit word meaning “union”. How does your studio Yogalution Movement & Ayurveda represent this act of “bringing-together”?

Our mission is to make yoga accessible to all, regardless of socioeconomic status, or identity. Although we may have different stories for why we go to class, ultimately, we are all looking to either feel better, be better, or do better in life. As yoga teachers, we understand life gets us so scattered, we disconnect from our own being. So we strive to bring the individual back together with themself. And as we do this very process, together in a group, it reminds us we are all alike. So making the studio donation-based meant stripping away one veil of separation: Money. And having diverse teachers has removed more veils of separation, such as race, gender, and sexual orientation. There is so much “bringing together” in our studio and in our community. We strive to role model diversity as best we can.

Q: Yoga on the Bluff is expansive and communal. Studio classes are intimate and vary in difficulty. How do the two tie into each other?

For me, the bluff has always been a platform to reach those who wanted to try yoga, but were highly unlikely to show up to a studio. And it’s true that since our free, outdoor classes are so visually appealing, at some point, whether in that instance, or whether it takes a year, they do show up. And eventually, they end up seeking more yoga and going to the studio, too.

Q:  I remember the first time ten people showed up to Yoga on the Bluff, and what seemed like soon thereafter, when you announced we had surpassed 100 attendees. There was an uproar of cheers through the crowd. It wasn’t long before you offered Yoga on the Bluff twice a day, seven days a week. What do you attribute to this incredible growth?

Wow, that was a long time ago! I remember those beginning days very well, and being blown away that there were 100 people!  Hands down it was consistency and authenticity. The motivation to start free yoga on the bluff was 100% heart-centered and strictly out of service to others in need. It came from a genuine heart. And kindness of spirit. Never, ever, would I have guessed that it would become what it is today.

We have been out there serving the community seven days a week for ten years straight (minus a few holidays and gay pride weekend). And always with this mood of heart-centered and kind-spirited offerings. I really do my best to find teachers for the bluff who are leaders. And who care about the well-being and unity of our community. I think we have had some amazing peace ambassadors on the bluff. And many, many lives have been touched and transformed over the last decade.

Q: Your website states, ‘“Yogulation’ is a movement for Peace and Change”, and you call your yoga teachers “Peace Ambassadors”. Words like “peace” and “change” feel reminiscent of political platforms. In which ways is the yogalution movement a political act?

At yogalution we try to live outside that mainstream box and keep things rooted, real and down to earth. You know, a business with some heart in it. My mission is to help us no longer see ourselves, and one another, as separate, as different, or as better or worse- which is what our politics these days are all about. That underlying rhetoric of having to fend for yourself, and not just be the best at what you do, but specifically, be better than others at what you do- that is the paradigm I am trying to help shift.

Anyone who propagates the true teachings of yoga, or any spiritual practice, for the sake of love for self and each other, is someone I would call an ambassador for peace. Again, unity in diversity. I guess you could call that a political act these days, but really that’s just by default. What’s motivating me has nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with the human experience.

Q: I think I can confidently say, I would’t have begun my journey with yoga in my early 20’s had it not been for your vision. You made it affordable and accessible, which isn’t what comes to mind when most people think of yoga. But I imagine that’s the case for a lot of students. Is there a single student testimony that’s stood out over the years?  

There have been so many letters, phone calls and in-person stories that are truly, truly amazing! But my most favorite, (super) heartwarming story is a recent one.

A student shared with me that Free Yoga on the Bluff allowed her to be more in tune with her body, and helped her realize she had a growth in her abdomen. When she had it checked out, they told her it was a cyst on her ovary; she’d have to have surgery to remove it. She said yoga with us gave her the strength to face the scary idea of having surgery. So it happens. They remove the cyst. And that’s when they realize…it was full of cancer. And had it gone unmanaged or unchecked, it would have spread all over. She said she most likely wouldn’t be standing in front of me sharing her story…Wow! It blew me away. It all started from simply getting in tune in and listening to her body. So powerful.

Q: What are your plans for the future of Yogalution– the business and movement?

Oh my, isn’t this the million dollar question! There are lots of things brewing. Some planned and some happening more organically.

I would love to get land somewhere for a retreat center. A sustainable community where us city folk could get into nature, every now and again, to reflect on how we have been showing up to life. I am also working on getting my 1970 Crown Royal School Bus up and renovated, so I can take yogalution movement on the road! We’ll have workshops, classes, yoga education and kirtan (devotional music) for anyone interested.

As for now, we’re acquiring the space next door… and expanding! We hope to add another yoga room for more specialized yoga classes. Like pregnancy yoga, LGBTQ classes, women’s only classes, men’s only classes, and more! We’ll have an amazing Acupuncturist, Denise Estrada, on board. And we plan to bring in a mental health therapist, as well as an ayurvedic practitioner. We want to offer a bigger spectrum of services that can truly benefit the community in their healing and transformation. I am also currently working on a 21-day Yoga Video Series that will be available online late this summer. So yeah, lots of stuff. Things are always growing and evolving… as they should be!

Whether you’re a first-timer or a seasoned yogi, Dharma has carved out a place in the Yogalution Movement for you. For an outdoor and communal experience, I highly reccomend Free Yoga on the Bluff- offered daily at 11am and 6pm. For a more intimate and tailored experience, The Yogalution Movement Studio offers an array of classes for a suggested donation of $10-$20, per class. If you are not Long Beach local, stay tuned for Dharma’s 21-Day Yoga Video Series, coming soon!

Find more information on class schedules and class descriptions here: https://www.yogalutionmovement.com.

    The post Studio Owner Dharma Shakti on Why Affordable Yoga is the Real Revolution appeared first on Kimberly Elise Natural Living.

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