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[whatevencomesnext]

I think when I started this blog I was thinking, we don’t need the internet to live, we don’t need the internet to look at art. But there’s a lot of art I never would have seen if not for the internet, because it’s so far away, because it’s so unfamiliar, because I wouldn’t know where to look for it otherwise. That led me to wonder, is there any art that is impossible to consume without the internet? I guess Batsea’s work falls under this category- she says so herself in that article.

So I went looking around again and I found the Fak’ugesi Festival website. And holy crow, is that ever amazing?? Being able to navigate a virtual gallery space is so… futuristic, haha.

And like!! In the Re/Member Your Descendants exhibit the paintings move! Isn’t that incredible???? I know that (Randy Feltface voice) it’s not particularly new technology, but I’m always amazed by VR and AR, it’s seriously cool!

I think this is similar to what Batsea was talking about, like, art that’s accessible for people anywhere with an internet connection. I, in North America, couldn’t easily look at a gallery in Africa… except now I can, because it’s not physically located in Africa. It’s virtual! It's super accessible!

It's so interesting to see African futuristic art!! Moradewun Adejunmobi writes about African sci-fi and Africa's relation to the genre, and it's neat to see how North America and Africa have different ideas about utopias. I'll have to check out some of the stories he talks about!

If the internet was more like this, more about sharing cultures and informations and less ruled by greed I think I’d be less unhappy with it. I don’t like how that information is controlled. I don’t like that Google manipulates and allows others to manipulate search results so you see sponsored content over everything else. I hate being constantly bombarded with ads everywhere I go online, I hate being told to CONSUME CONSUME CONSUME. I just want to learn and be.

I don't even know where I’m going with this. What choice do I have? Can I disconnect? Do I even want to? Can I even pull myself back that far? Far enough to get off social media, even though everyone else is on it and just accept that I'm not going to understand that culture anymore as it changes? 

How could I embrace this culture, while wanting to reject it at the same time?

I made this blog to vent, but honestly, i've been pretty happy when posting here. Because just thinking out loud (so to speak) has gotten me interested in futuristic art. I never would have researched half of the stuff i did if i didn't come on here, having a crisis. And like, yeah!! Right now sucks!! But there's a thread of hope running through a lot of these futurist artworks. "Visionary fiction"- I like that term. It’s hard to not get caught up in the excitement of new tech when you’re looking at work that is so clearly excited about it, you know? And like, if I can look to the future and see more diversity, more accessibility, more equality… it’s better than focusing on the bad stuff. I'd forgotten how valuable new perspectives can be.

[whatevencomesnext]

Okay lol I was joking in my first post about going to live in the woods but i was bored and my lease is almost up in this apartment so i was looking on real estate sites for places in the country… it’s not like i can afford anything atm but a girl can dream right?? I’m prepared that next time I go on youtube or whatever all my ads are going to be “Buy a home in X!” “How to afford a home in your 20s!” “how to afford a house by selling snake oil!” or something. can i not just look up stupid stuff in peace, google? I wanna just walk into the woods and like… become a part of it, like that scene from Annihilation (the movie, obviously, the anthropologist died way earlier and more violently in the books lol)

When i was looking in the futurism tag, I also saw illustrations by idil dursun. They’re neat, and the artist is clearly very skilled, but like… I don’t know, does anyone just feel dread when looking at that kind of stuff?

Buildings that block out the natural light. Everything is some variation of grey. Building up, implying that there’s no more surface area on the planet to build things on laterally. Where are the trees, the flowers, the grass, the birds, the squirrels? Is this a future where those things don’t exist? How do humans breathe? How do they eat? Am i reading too far into this?? Where's the green space??????

It makes me think of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, who are discussing colonizing Mars and doing space travel for fun. They’re absurdly wealthy so they can afford to “dream big” and try to make those dreams reality… but what about half the population of the planet we’re CURRENTLY ON, who are starving?? Who could really benefit from all that money you’re pouring into your big dumb rocket?

Nature is a present element in a lot of Indigenous artwork, but I get the feeling the focus is more on the traditions, than nature itself. Or no, more like the traditions are intertwined with nature. That's a better way of putting it. I'm not Indigenous, but that's how I understand it at least? There's this respect for the land that isn't present in a lot of Western art/visions of the future.

I saw this short film and thought it was awesome, because in this space travel mission, she's the one who has the knowledge that was passed down to her thanks to her culture and traditions, so she ends up being the one to save the corn, and by extension, the mission.

Grace L Dillon talks about erasure in the context of Indigenous histories, traditions, systems... thinking about that in the context of seeing The 6th World film makes me happy that this is being acknowledged in this film, at least.

But actually since I was thinking about Annihilation, it seems like a bit of a missed opportunity to not have the actress playing the psychologist in the movie be Indigenous! She is in the books, and her connection to the land is a fairly important part of her character and her motivations - though that's hard to tell in the first book, especially since no one is really "identified"- they don't even have names! Is that "erasure" that Dillon was talking about what happened here? I mean, even the plot from the book to the movie is completely different so I guess I didn't notice, but now... huh. The biologist should have been Asian as well, now that I think about it. This is the kind of thing that needs to be given more attention.

[whatevencomesnext]

I was curious, so I looked up “future” and “futurism” on Tumblr just to see what would pop up. An awful lot of neon art and filters, some cool fashion, mostly aesthetic type stuff. I learned what “retrofuturism” is, and there were some older-looking illustrations, which was cool. One that caught my attention was these drawings of robot ladies by Hajime Sorayama. I’m linking to the post instead of reblogging it because uhhhh i dont want my vent blog to appear in the notes of the original posts I saw, lol. 

It looks really neat, like it’s really well drawn, and I looked up the artist’s website and… sigh. I can’t go anywhere on the internet without running into porn. I’m so tired of constantly seeing women objectified everywhere, but especially online, you can't go long without running into it accidentally.

Man… I’m so tired of this. Is this the dream, guys? Is this what the future is supposed to be like? I bet it’s a lot easier to rationalize objectifying women if you’re envisioning exaggeratedly woman-shaped hunks of metal that are designed to be sexy. I bet metal sex dolls won’t get mad at you for treating them like they’re less than human, like all those stupid real women do. 

Sigh. 

On the bright side, Sorayama isn’t the only Japanese futurist artist I found. Mariko Mori is a female artist who also deals with the objectification of women in her work, although she criticizes it instead of going along with it. She’s a performance artist who was apparently shocked when she saw “an educated woman who only served tea at the office” x Her pieces, Tea Ceremony, were a protest against the objectification of women in this way. She dresses both like an android and an office worker, and is ignored by the men around her. I like her work! 

One thing she said that I thought was interesting was the article I saw about her says this:

“Beyond the macho elements of society, Mariko Mori is interested in the identity associated with gender and its current processes of redefinition. She believes she has acquired significant enough experience to ‘understand that a man and a woman are different, so how we contribute to the society may vary, as our roles could be differentiated.’ But differentiation does not mean subordination. Tea Ceremony aspires to illuminate this issue, ‘to create a better world.’”

Differentiation does not mean subordination. Wow, that’s an awesome line. It’s so depressing to look at work like Sorayama’s and see sci-fi where women are objectified. No change from how things are, the porn/sex is just more accessible. I feel like it’s hard to find media that lets women be women, not objects or pseudo-men. What I mean by the latter is that, especially in media nowadays, movie producers will take a female character and give her “male traits” to empower her. The implication being that women are not good or strong unless they can act like men. And yeah, most traits don’t (and shouldn’t) fit into a f/m binary, but it’s stupid to sit there and say that women are just as physically strong as men when our bodies are built differently. Captain Marvel is a perfect example of this being done horribly, in addition to nothing in the story possibly being different if she was a man and not a woman, she is also not allowed to have any character growth or noticeable traits besides being really rude to most of the humans she encounters. Awesome, what a great female role model! As Galetea says more or less directly in these videos, this is sexism disguised as feminism. Instead of designing a weak stereotype, or an object, or a pseudo-man, why not just let a female character be a human woman?

Sigh. I dream of a future where women and girls are treated as equitably as men, where women are allowed to be feminine without it being portrayed as weak or stupid, where women are valued as human beings. Someday.

[whatevencomesnext]

I was going to start this post with “Okay, since last night I’ve calmed down,” but actually, I don’t think I have? I still have more stuff I want to say about the internet! With the massive growth of the internet since the 90s it seems like there isn’t anywhere to go but like… more internet? If that makes sense? Like the internet is such a humongous part of all our lives, social media especially, and its only grown since the pandemic started.

X. I know it's an art installation but what a mood, right?

There is a degree of irony (or perhaps hypocrisy?), I realize, in using a social media platform to vent about social media. Tumblr doesn’t have those same algorithms I was mentioning and there’s what feels like a greater degree of anonymity here, but the pessimistic part of me wonders how long it’ll be before even that changes and I’ll have to sign into my hyperbole-laden vent blog with my biodata. THAT sounds like a dystopia to me, haha

Seriously though, it's hard to look into the internet-future and see anything good. It’s… I don’t know if reassuring is the right word, but at least I know I’m not the only one who hates it and doesn’t want to participate in it. 

Adrienne Maree Brown talks briefly about "Visionary fiction" in her outro from Octavia's Brood. Contrasted with science fiction, it's more about looking at the needs around us and envisioning a future where those needs are met and then gone above and beyond! That sounds like the kind of futurism I want to see. I'd like to see a future where people aren't so lonely and sad and easily radicalized by algorithms and addicted to their tech to the extent it becomes a part of them.

But... I can also find and look at artists who are honestly and earnestly embracing the internet and internet culture, and that can be exciting too. Masha Batsea is an artist i found while looking around that seems to have an interesting point of view. She and I are of the same generation, kids who grew up on the internet, but she seems to be focused more on the connection, the sharing of cultures, the culture that is specific to people who grew up on the internet. She makes video art and like… it feels really familiar, yknow?

In the Calvert Journal, she talks about how sharing cultures should be celebrated. It’s neat that her art seems to be specifically for people on the internet, especially since it’s formatted to be seen online. It’s more accessible than a gallery, but not universally accessible. The internet culture, although dominated by american culture, can possibly still be universal. Batsea seems to aim for a future where everyone is connected and united, but still different, and those differences are celebrated.

I think that would be good, more in line with what it FEELS like the internet is supposed to be about, you know? That philosophy feels more in line with "visionary fiction" and a fair and equally accessible community seems like a dream. But honestly, I don’t think it can happen as long as the ones in charge of the platforms we use profit from us fighting and encourage radicalization through their algorithms.

[whatevencomesnext]

Oh mannn I completely forgot about Tumblr! This was all I was on when I was a teenager. Wow. I’ve been going and deleting all my social medias because I’m sick of them, I’m sick of the culture and the algorithms and how addictive they are. Something something cleaning up my digital footprint so I can actually get a job, but mostly I’ve just decided I don’t like social media anymore. I guess Tumblr is different, it's a lot easier to be anonymous imo. I don’t even know what this is. One last shout into the void.

I'm tired of social media and how unhappy it makes me, and so I've been thinking a lot about the role tech has in my life and the lives of people around me. The first ever art class I took that was more focused on technology, the prof told us right off the bat that we were basically cyborgs. Even if most of us don’t have like, brain implants or a third arm (like that crazy artist guy Kenneth told me about)

But our tech is still more or less attached to us. I mean think about it, person who probably stumbled across this blog by accident, can you remember the last time you didn’t have your phone with you? Or near you? Or close enough to get easily? According to A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway, a cyborg is someone with both organic and cybernetic parts. A mix of the two. It seems really, like, sci-fi, but isnt it kinda true? And man, I don’t know how to deal with that. That prof told our class that aaaages ago and I still think about it, like especially over the pandemic. We’re way way more dependent on tech than we were even a few years ago and idk, it seems like I’m the only one under 40 that finds that unnatural? Like, we as a species figured out how to survive a million billion years or whatever just fine without smartphones and wifi everywhere. Why is it so essential to our lives now?

It totally freaks me out as well. I get ads on youtube related to stuff I mention out loud. I feel like I should be wearing a tinfoil hat when I say these kinds of things, but its something a lot of people know about AS A FACT- but just dont care. I just started watching an older show with my roommate and okay like I’ve never used facebook aside from uni class group chats but i logged on the other day bc i forgot my aunt’s birthday and like. Facebook was like hey! Wanna join a fan group for this show? :) It made me want to throw my laptop into the wall!!!!

And yeah, there’s a part of me that’s like, woah thats kind of an extreme reaction. But like!!!!! Don’t I have a right to privacy?? Can’t I talk about whatever stupid thing I want without worrying about who’s listening outside the room and selling this info to the corporate overlords at Meta???? I told my dad about that happening and he got creeped out, understandably, and then I told my brother and he was like “yeah? That’s how it is lol” And like!! I don’t know if im alone in this but thats not how it should be????

I’m gonna buy a flip phone and go live in the woods. Contacting my loved ones should not come at the price of being wiretapped.