PULP: ISSUE 11 2023

11 pulp.

PULP is published on the sovereign land of the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation. We pay our respects to Elders past and present, as well as Indigenous members of our creative community. We respect the knowledge and customs that traditional Elders and Aboriginal people have passed down from generation to generation. We acknowledge the historical and continued violence and dispossession against First Nations peoples. Australia’s many institutions, including the University itself, are founded on this very same violence and dispossession. As editors, we will always stand in solidarity with First Nations efforts towards decolonisation and that solidarity will be reflected in the substance and practice of this magazine.

Sovereignty was never ceded. Always was and always will be Aboriginal land.

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President’s foreword USU President — Nazanin Sharifi

September has been a busy month for USU. We’ve been working behind the scenes to plan some of the biggest events in the 2024 calendar to ensure that we are serving the diverse needs of our members. We excitingly launched our inaugural Festival of Creativity this month celebrating the vibrant creativity of our members. It was heartening to see so many of our Clubs and Societies as well as external providers participate over the three-day festival.

Earlier in the month, USU Board endorsed a statement in support of the Voice to Parliament (can be read on our website and Instagram), and we hope to continue our commitment to supporting Indigenous First Nations members by finalising our Reconciliation Action Plan.

Looking ahead, I am keen for the Someday Soon Musical Festival happening on the 21st of October at Manning Bar. It will be a fantastic opportunity to have fun after mid-semester assessments and before finals. Links to the tickets can be found on our website.

If you have any feedback, comments or questions please do not hesitate to reach out at president@usu.edu.au! See you all around!

Warmest regards, Naz

Senior Editor Kate Saap

Editors

Huw Bradshaw Simon Harris Justine Hu Sonal Kamble Lizzy Kwok Lameah Nayeem

Design

Simon Harris Justine Hu

Front Cover Yuki Namerikawa

Back Cover

Kadie Dao & Reese Claro

The views in this publication are not necessarily the views of USU. The information contained within this edition of PULP was correct at the time of printing.

This publication is brought to you by the University of Sydney Union.

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Issue 11, 2023

Editorial

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This is the one where we talk about Art. We didn’t intend this, it just happened that for ISSUE 11 everyone was big on either making art or writing about it. Wedged between every poem, you will find a commentary on where you might find art: in a gallery, at a crime scene, on a website. Amongst every photo, you’ll find an exploration into what art is, or could be: a game, an act, a post.

Maybe the whole magazine is art. In 1951, Marshall McLuhan wrote that “the French symbolists, followed by James Joyce in Ulysses, saw that there was a new art form of universal scope present in the technical layout of the modern newspaper.” Is it too far of a stretch to propose a magazine like PULP, in its superficial chaos, could be art too, could lead to cosmic harmonies as Joyce imagined a newspaper could?

We’re not telling you what to think. We’re not even telling you to think at all; just to read.

Enjoy ISSUE 11.



Senior Editor’s note

PULP has started our own psyop division and we’re looking for new recruits. I’m not interested in your ability to see into the future or live off of brain waves or whatever else Phillp K. Dick’s Ubik (1969) is about; PULP psyop division is about lifting up the river rocks and taking a peek (pic) at what’s underneath. Just have a long hard think and you’ll understand. We’re going global: spread the word.

In other news: we’ve made the journey across campus to our new office! I will miss watching the college Wimbledon at the Manning tennis courts. I will miss bird spotting. I will miss TeaSoc. Most of all, I will miss those piano virtuosos, learning how to play the La La Land theme tune with laborious care. But I’m excited for this new chapter in PULP’s story. See you there! New office directions and hours are posted everywhere.

ISSUE 11 launch party, classic Inner West style. Lit. Crazy. Movie. Secret location, BYO, register on Facebook for details.

Love always, Kate <3

P L U P Y

Contents  

1. Photo Review II 6. Curatorial whiplash 12. Trial by memory 14. Small talk with your left-behind 16. The Eyes Behind Surveillance 20. Fitzroy 22. Haunting in reverse 24. Wet Sun 28. Dependency 30. The Panorama Report 34. Undressed to Impress 36. Imagining childhood in Lebak Siliwangi 40. Scene of the Crime 44. Will Art History remember Furry Porn?

46. The soundtrack of my childhood and other songs to run over pedestrians to 50. Specs of my core, Exploding outwards.

54. Music and my place in the Cloud 56. The Sun Worshippers 58. Selling Sex 60. What if i wanted to be a duck?

62. Noumenia 66. Trend Tracking

pulp issue 10 launch photos by @octopi_darling_

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Pulp Photo Review II

Another month in review, some pictures from you to you.

-S

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Thank you to:

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WordsChina Meldrum

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am being haunted by the ghost of 500 photos of the same rock at Pompeii.

And 30 panoramic nightmares of Monet’s Water Lillies taken on my Galaxy Note 5 circa 2014. I am haunted by a mirror selfie at the MCA. I am haunted by a decades long scroll through the Victoria and Albert photos taken just in case I needed them for an essay the next year (I didn’t).

I am haunted, consistently, constantly, by photos in art galleries. This isn’t a Christmas Carol situation, but the ghosts of museums past are popping up in Apple’s AI memories section to remind me that yes, in 2017, I did in fact go see that sculpture/painting/photo/ play/snow/bowl of ramen/dog. While in the 1810s we’d get on our horse and cart and trek to the museum for an afternoon of culture, I can now take a quick few clicks to Google Arts and Culture and zoom in to exceptional levels of detail on a decent chunk of today’s

masterpieces. Nothing can replace the home. Despite the medical nightmare, I’d museum; I will never argue against it both out personally advocate for curatorial whiplash: of principle and a healthy amount of nostalgia. an in-between space where both old and But the museum is changing. We are living in new objects, and old and new curation can a time where the museum’s cultural relevance, interact. A veritable palimpsest of curatorial funding and societal stature is oscillating eras, where the wall to wall hangings of the violently between abolition and protection Parisian Salon, the White Cube of the avant above all else. We must ask ourselves the garde 60’s and the contemporary exhibit question: in this new world, what do museums mould together to create a familiar yet mean, and what can they do? entirely new way to see art. In this murky time where curation is constantly changing, I Curation is experiencing a shift that I believe can’t predict where the museum will go. What is well needed, a shift towards rethinking the I can do is look into what happened to the bounds of the museum from just a place to museum, what we might do with it, and how put art on walls to a more experiential world – you and I could maybe even shape it. So make creating new, interactive and interdisciplinary a tea, and let’s indulge in some writing (or in ways to view art. However, I want to argue in your case, reading), and maybe by the end we favour of keeping a bit of the old. Museums would have learnt something, or at the very house hundreds of thousands of artefacts, least, had a big old think. And who doesn’t tapestries of the past, and some really quite love that. nice looking old chairs that still need a

But what if my iPhone 14 Pro Max really was a readymade?

When I set out to write this piece, I really did mirror has become a new avenue for artists to art that don’t exist through a camera, but not want to go into the death vortex of talking encourage, condemn or reflect (haha, get it), the experience of photography in museums about social media, but alas, we live in a on the interaction between artist and viewer. is most definitely not going away. However, world where Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerburg Mao Tongqiang’s Order, presents the viewer in an article talking about the changing want to get into Youtuber boxing and we with a mirror riddled with intricately placed space of the museum, it might be worth all somehow know about it, so we will have bullets, that lodge enough that they make an actually talking about museums. Phones and to talk (briefly) about the elephant in room. impact but don’t shatter the mirror entirely. photography have allowed us to take a step Luckily for you (and me), I only care for the Instead you look at the mirror, and the towards interacting more actively with the hardware. We now live with this needlessly distorted reflection you see simultaneously museum, but inevitably the most impactful sophisticated device in our pockets at all brings a message about mass shootings and and radical change will be how museums times, with four cameras, a laser (somehow) the use of violence for state control, but also have changed to interact with us. and more data than what was needed for the about our place in it. Apart from concept, moon landing. Photography in museums the defining aspect of Order is the mirror, is now a given fact, and one of the most and the photos that almost every person momentous changes in the museumgoers took in front of it. Myself, my friend Amy experience in the 21st century is the fact that and the five other people in White Rabbit, you can see art, through your eyes, at any on a rogue Tuesday morning all conducted time, forever. It is curious to think about why an unconscious elaborate dance around we are so drawn to photography – an artistic the work, finding an angle that distorts our expression in itself – while we look at art. heads, outlines our reflection and then, not simultaneously but all in due time, we took I would say that this new interaction we a photo. Surely this is not just superficial but have with art is becoming an art form in its reflective of a change in our interaction with own right. Going to see art, and appreciating art itself. art is an identity in a way: a signal that you have appreciation for culture, random pretty Whilst I wouldn’t be writing R. Mutt on things, political consciousness, and the time my phone and trying to get it into the Tate, to go to the weird spots Sydney decides to our phones play a new and put its museums. This is a stance that could somehow exciting role in the turn out to be pretty bleak; if taking photos experience of the museum. of art is just a way to show that you have When we take photographs, some cultural awareness, then is the act of we are not passive in the act museum-going becoming a farce? There of looking. We frame art and hasn’t been a single time in the last few years place it in our lives. When where I haven’t gone into a museum and had we post our photos, we to tread lightly around a candid shot, and again go through somewhat even I fall victim to posting art to show that of a microcosm of curation I am indeed looking at art. Is this shallow or itself. We select what art vain? Potentially. Even if the reason why we represents us, what we want photograph the museum experience is just to the world to see, we write portray an air of culture, the most superficial captions about it (even if photos of you looking at art involve you that caption is, “lee bul is looking at art. In that sense, there is still a mother”), and we put it in significant interaction with art. In fact, the the world. Our identity way that we use photography to express is intertwined with art. interactions with art adds personality, There is still an element of and a new layer of expression. bleakness, and something Increasingly, or at least in the remains to be said about Order, 2018 last 20 or so years, the mindful interactions with Mao Tongqiang

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9 Curatorial Whiplash (neck injuries not included) Museums are a space of many weird and wonderful feelings. Art has a transformative effect that can be uplifting, confusing, saddening, contemplative, and in the case of Barnett Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III, unbridled rage (look that one up, it is a hilarious story). Art brings forth emotion, but also logic, reasoning, appreciation and a sensory experience unlike any other. It has been like this since the Chauvet Cave Paintings, and unless we enter a full blown apocalypse it will remain like this for however many years we have left. Curation has moved through many eras during this time but what is most curious is our current era; the transitional phase between the White Cube, to the experiential curatorial practice of today.

art should exist in a space where you can contemplate each work in isolation, without interference. However, the white cube has been critiqued for its sterilisation of art, the elitism that it indicates, and the lack of information about the art you are looking at that ended up causing even more alienation between the public and the art world. The white cube still reigns as the most prevalent curatorial practice, but is no longer the only practice. Art and design now intersect in the NGV’s exhibit on Pierre Bonnard’s paintings, designed by India Madhavi, where the white walls are discarded for technicolour aimed at enhancing Bonnard’s art. I mean, even HSBC, the Bonnard exhibitions primary sponsor, is saying (albeit via. a Wynyard light rail stop ad), “when art and design intersect we experience something remarkable.” The From Bauhaus to de Kooning to Warhol to V&A’s ‘DIVA’ showcases light design that Picasso, the 20th century was dominated guides you from theme to theme, directing the by the ‘White Cube’. The term White Cube viewer to an entirely new museum experience was coined in 1976 by Brian O’Doherty, and where art is displayed as a story through described the white walled gallery where art queer culture. Curation is seeing new and exists in a white void – ripe for contemplation exciting developments aimed at highlighting and reflection. The white spaces between and uplifting contemporary art through artworks give both physical and mental space, design, rather than exiling the viewer to their and according to O’Doherty, the White Cube own contemplation. acts as a border and container for art. This gallery style was and continues to be one But not all curation exists in this new space. of the most widely used designs to this day, For the most part museums display art on especially in the canon of modern art. The walls, with text beside it, and we shuffle from White Cube reminded viewers, “This Is Art. room to room looking. Art is remarkable and You are in the sanctity of the white cube, beautiful enough for this to be an incredible where Art lives” (this helped in the 70s when experience, but it would be a disservice not everyone seemed to reach obscene heights of to talk about the other side of museums and experimental madness simultaneously and the the vast collections of knowledge from the general public freaked out). So what happened past that are not displayed in such dynamic to the white cube and what will succeed it in cutting edge ways. How do we reckon with the era’s of curation? a museum space where one turn takes us to a bright blue wall with an interactive O’Doherty writes, “The ideal gallery phone guide, and another leads to a room subtracts from the artwork all cues that full of forks sitting in a glass display case? interfere with the fact that it is ‘art.’ The work Museums are in metamorphosis, the next is isolated from everything that would detract generation of curators are in chrysalis and from its own evaluation… Unshadowed, we are living in this unique world where white, clean, artificial – the space is the old is combined with the increasingly devoted to the technology of aesthetics.” new. To me, these moments encapsulate the The philosophy of the white cube is that experience that I call curatorial whiplash. The

Pierre Bonard @ NGV

experience of being in the concentric circles of 17th century petticoat doom to suddenly seeing Lil Nas X’s Satan shoes being on display as a hallmark artefact of 21st century fashion. Seeing a watercolour workshop that projects your drawing onto a screen in the foyer of the AGNSW and then turning right and viewing 15 different landscapes of the Blue Mountains. While regular whiplash is (according to Google) painful, and associated with severe neck and back pain, I would argue that curatorial whiplash doesn’t need to be all that bad. Sure, it can be confusing moving between all these different experiences, and while there is a move to experiential museums where your phone can become a makeshift readymade in itself, there is still a worthy place for the white cube, the burgundy rooms of portraits and the vast halls of plates in the V&A.

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It’s hard to think about where to end, in my rundown of curation. There are countless things missed, left out, cut for time, and fuzzy unformed ideas lurking about like primordial soup in my head, and maybe yours also. But apart from all of the seriousness in discussing museums, what I particularly love about these new changes is the interactivity that we now have with art. Instead of quiet contemplation, art is being displayed to enhance, not detract and place in isolation. It creates an experience that allows for new thoughts and inspiration and most importantly, fun. I resent the idea that going to see museums and art has to result in realisation, finding meaning, and “getting something out of it”. I think that going to see art is something innately fun.

Something we do with our friends, our family, on holiday. Something for us. Something to celebrate what humans can do, can create.

Feats of craftsmanship, conceptualisation, and creativity that is unimaginable until it is done time and time and time again. In my humble opinion, if art is even just chucked on a wall then there is already a wealth of knowledge to be gained. When art on its own is so impactful, the role of curation is merely to find an adequate way to show it. O’Doherty concludes in his afterword, “visual art does not progress by having a good memory… You can reinvent the past, suitably disguised, if no one remembers it. Thus is originality, that patented fetish of the self, defined.” I wouldn’t be surprised if in a few decades, or even a few months, we were to feel some new kind of whiplash again.

11 What will happen to the room of plates?

Museums are as unpredictable as art itself, museum as a post-aesthetic place, one where and the art we create urges the museum to the museum morphs into not just a place to change as a space that will both physically house art but an experiential arena for social and ideologically house it. Is there still a and political action. A change that shifts place for the room of plates in contemporary the art museum entirely away from art and curation? Who’s to say? Maybe if I could look enmeshes it in our personal worlds, for better into a Year 5 classroom, there would be a or for worse. Will this be the case, come ten kid, not yet remarkable in any particular way, or even one year down the track? It’s hard to but an avid fan of doodling and reading and say. One of my favourite things about change, handball. Maybe they would have an inkling when I’m not trying my best to resist it, is that of interest about art, maybe they wouldn’t, at we will never know quite what will happen. least not yet. Maybe if we gave them a couple Are museums moving to a good place? Or a of years, they could be the one who finds a bad place? Is it post-aesthetic? Is there even a cutting edge way to curate 18th century plates place for the museum, given its upholding of in the V&A. Maybe this deeply underrated an outdated, oftentimes prejudiced system? room would morph into the star event, and Wu concludes, “The trouble of thinking of new books about these plates, forks and chairs anything in terms like ‘pre-’ and ‘post-’ is would be written (rightfully so, honestly). that time is rarely so linear. The post-aesthetic museum is over, it’s just beginning, it’s Simon Wu argues in his piece, The Museum: already here – if we know what to look for.”

A New Social Sculpture, that even if museums change entirely to encompass the These questions all exist, and I have tried to best social, artistic and political practices, tease the answers out of some of them, but the the changes museums will make are never only remaining thought I can think of is this: ending, unpredictable and relentless. Just as won’t it be so exciting to see where it will all one curatorial practice is created, another go. Go to a museum, and go frequently. You oversight pops up. Just as curation and never know what will happen on those walls. museum design catches up to contemporary art, art changes again. He presents the

Trial

I. ARRIVAL I have walked up and down these stairs nearly every day for the past eight years, yet there’s a gaping

by memory absence where gentle memories should live.

There’s nothing particularly beautiful about the train station, nothing really worth looking at. Everything is grey, that cloudy colour that casts a film over your eyes when you’ve barely woken from a long dream. Grey, grey, grey — the most intriguing of the colours, we say morally grey to connote artful complexity, a threedimensional quality that should be venerated, the peak of a pendulum swing between two extremities. Grey means nothing so celebratory for Glenfield Station.

At 2:55pm on weekdays, a crowd of high school students suffocate the concourse in swaths of royal-blue blazers and pleated skirts. I went to that school. On Tuesdays, a worker sweeps the floors. His cheeks jiggle like pudding and his cropped white hair encircles his skull like powdered sugar. I have not seen him in some time.

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Nothing about this place is supposed to stick. What is it, then, to live somewhere without memory? I can recall coming here on winter nights, when a dreary mist blurred streetlights as if God had heaved a sigh,

summer days when trees reached upwards in worship, their topmost leaves burnt by the sun, I can even recall a woman attempting to jump onto the tracks one afternoon.

Extracting these images from my mind is a laborious process, requiring the same precision that it would take to separate oxygen from air. They don’t have the same textured quality of real memories — they’re flat, incomplete: a single star penetrating the blackness of a night sky, a hollow in a tree that resembled an eye, a woman’s anguished face when a worker pulled her back from the edge of the platform, becoming a pink pinprick in the distance as the train departed.

I think, after a few years, these images will become obsolete anyway.

II. AVOIDANCE Eyes open, eyes closed. Eyes open: buildings moving past at an alarming speed, whorls of city lights and laughter from girls in sequin dresses standing on the sidewalk. Eyes seeing a dashboard, their lights contrasted against the darkness of the inside of the Uber. Eyes closed: the heart is beating at a soft, regular pace. A dull pain is growing at the back of the skull. The tongue is dry and scrapes against the roof of the mouth.

The back of the car is humid and

sticky, a mustardy scent clings to the seats. I madly lower the window as someone beside me confirms an address with the driver.

For a moment I cannot recall ever meeting this girl. I am painfully unfamiliar with her marquise-cut eyes. Then the past few hours

come back to me in a spiral, a single strand resistant to forming a whole sphere.

III. DELIVERANCE This house of God is a small one. The first time I was here, I did not know how to pray.

Standing among several women, I watched their bodies curl forwards into question marks, foreheads pressed to the floor, until their frames were condensed into full stops.

So self-assured, so soft for whatever decrees rain from the sky.

I recall the frenzied ecstasy that only seizes me when I am in the presence of smiles and bodies, the stark and joyous contrast to the silent house I am returning to. I can recall the music, the conversations with strangers, the exchange of questions and answers like kisses. I want to laugh — not like the people flirting at the bar — but a laugh that threatens to crack open my chest and force all its Something about it makes it difficult for me contents onto the floor of the taxi — because, to breathe. finally, I too can dance.

Somewhere in the I remember when I used to pray, when city there are I could swear I heard a voice in showgirls dancing the thunder and eyes in the to buoyant jazz lightning. Nature has tunes, and I am stopped meeting finally like me since then. them as halfremembered I stand in a house of God, shoulder to shoulder conversations with at parties are women and pirouettes, halfchildren. genuine promises They have to have lunch the next taken off day with beautiful and their shoes impeccably-dressed strangers are and grand jetes, I can dance because I am leathery no longer alone. sandals swarm the The taxi pauses at a stop light. Outside the entrance. They descend to their window, a man busks on the street. A small knees. Their hands tremble. cat is twined between his legs.

Something moves them, but I no longer know what.

I do not want these ripples of memory to I join them anyway. I evade me, though their edges — usually want to speak with hardened by the edge of reality — have God, want to already become soft, vague. Again, like catch up. the spiral, the coil has two faces. The face glimmers with tantalising images, but its With underside is steeled by the realistion that I am coming home to an empty, silent house.

Once I am back in my bedroom, I will write in my journal. I will write in very short sentences. I will use a surgeon’s precision to retain every detail I can remember. I will falsify certain things, make things appear glamorous when they are in fact mundane, in case I ever read back on these moments. To shame, keep the silence away, I will lie.

I realise

I am adept at remembering him at my worst. I am slightly more fickle at my best. Most pertinent is how he recedes from the manner of all things when everything is quiet, steady. The ordinary is too polite for the divine — he disappears from the same bus driver I see on King Street on Thursday evenings, the ducks grazing the pond at Victoria Park, a musician performing at a dingy bar. There is no room for him, but somehow everything still sings.

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I feel it then — that prophecy of air, the monumental leap. Whatever spirit seduces the trapeze artist to loosen their fingers and plunge into freefall finds me now. With hands help up to pray I can ask, why have you betrayed me by making me incapable of loving you?

I think they have lied this entire time — the world stands painfully still with all its shadows and trees, so immobile until we glare and it flinches. That wholeness I am supposed to feel when observing my memories, where is it? In their absence, I resolve, there is freedom. Above the freedom, there is nothing.

During the car ride home, my mother catches my eye in the rearview mirror. She can tell my mind is astray. She recites, He said, remember me and I will remember you.

With closed eyes I think, whatever may seek me may have me.

Words Lameah Nayeem

Small talk with your left-behind M

y phone’s run out of charge again. It was at 3% in Sarah’s kitchen, 2% when I Googled the mating rituals of praying mantises, and now — at 12:53am, on Platform 7 of Redfern Station — it’s dead.

“Fuck.” I exhale through my teeth and scratch this sentence into the margins of a Grassroots flyer.

There is a straight-backed, silver-haired woman sitting at the platform across from me.

Her hands are on her knees, her palms upturned to the flaccid tangle of telegraph wires.

Her eyes are closed. There is a scab above her left eyebrow.

Her feet, which are small and reedy, float centimetres above the cement; and Her dress is papery, apricot-patterned, frayed at the ankle. It flutters in the tepid September breeze.

I wonder whether she’s praying, or meditating, and whether she’s prone to impatience, but the 01:01 train arrives before I work it out. It takes four minutes to depart; four minutes to expose the translucent creature perched in her place.

[It’s difficult for me to separate the memories of people from the places they once inhabited. Absence has pinned lots of my ghosts to brick and footpath and sag-seated armchair. Now there is always some nonchalant, soft-edged memory loitering in my peripheral vision, given my eyes and heart have had enough time to adjust. This feeling — that absence is more permanent than presence — is what I’ve tried to draw.]

Tomorrow morning Mum will ask how my night was.

She will want a street name, a jaundiced suburb, a yawning stretch of concrete blemished by potholes. I, too, will want for something cement-like, and unearth the chipped edge of a crimson bathroom tile, a compost bin upended over a rotting wattle bush; steam rising, slowly, from a bowl with ‘Sarah K2’ scrawled on it in faded Sharpie.

I’ll brush past my real memory when I’m running late for my Tuesday 10 a.m.

A flash of silver, of gold-grouted palm — like a shining fish in shallow water — the apricot woman will resume her prayer.

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Illustrations Claudia Blane

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House party

Redfern station

Apartment corridor

The Eyes Behind Surveillance:

The Barbican Centre through the eyes of the CCTV 16

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alking through the Barbican Arts Centre with the unblinking gaze of the CCTV camera as my constant companion, I am reminded of the dystopian reality in which I exist. It is a world where privacy is a distant memory. It hides in the corners of our streets, our workplaces, and even our homes, prompting us to reconsider the role of surveillance in society.

As technology rapidly evolves, the boundaries between public and private have blurred. In an era where we willingly share personal information online, the concept of privacy has taken on new dimensions. We find ourselves living in a world where our every move can be tracked, archived, and analysed. Tiktokers can find your exact geographical location or birthday through simple three-minute tutorial clips.

I stand at the entrance, my “head” screwed on as I take my first inspection of the space. The shutter of Dylan’s film camera solidifies my existence there. The very essence of this place, a monument to Brutalism, speaks of a world that values order and control above all else.

You are stuck in a paradigm of knowing you are being watched but losing the cameras in the grandeur of the architecture, so you go on about your day.

My footsteps echo through the desolate walkways, a solitary sound in the silence of the surveillance infrastructure. The clunky metal case on my head emulates the bleak symmetry of the corridors, the uniformity that suppresses dissent.

Up the steps, to the left and I’ve risen above most. I scan my gaze up. The shutter of the camera clicks, I saw that.

The Barbican Centre stands as a relic of a time when freedom and individuality were sacrificed in the name of conformity and control. These concrete walls have witnessed the struggles of countless individuals, their stories silenced by the surveillance state: a testament to the ability to idealise obedience.

Emerging from the ashes of World War II, post-war London was a city in dire need of rebirth, reconstruction, and renewal. The spectre of austerity loomed large, as the nation grappled with economic challenges and the daunting task of rebuilding its shattered urban

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landscapes. The Barbican’s stark, unapologetic concrete façade reveals an emphasis on functionality and is a direct reflection to the broader socioeconomic context of the era. The idea was to provide affordable housing in a centralised location, addressing the needs of the working-class population. The very essence of Brutalism sought to eschew the ostentatious and ornate architectural excesses of the past, instead embracing a utilitarian ethos that celebrated the functional and the efficient. It sought to provide the much-needed housing, cultural spaces, and communal amenities to a city grappling with overcrowding and urban decay. In this sense, the Barbican’s utilitarian beauty was a direct response to the pressing needs of London’s development as a capitalist oasis. Its emphasis on communal living and public spaces underscored the value of shared resources and collective experiences, aligning with the aspirations of the London City Council and government for its working population.

When Right to Buy was introduced in 1980, however, almost all of the housing became privately owned. The juxtaposition of the once-public housing with the current luxury setting underscores the evolving landscape of our urban environments in London. Architects and planners sought to create a visually cohesive environment, with the dearth of visible signs of habitation, such as the prohibition of hanging laundry on balconies and storing personal items, insisting on everyone conforming.

I make my way down to the crowds keen for a closer look. I stand above others as I rise from the bench. The public’s response is nothing short of Orwellian in its complexity.

Their reactions are a tableau of discomfort, entertainment, and curiosity intermingling like characters in a dystopian narrative. Some passersby cast furtive glances, their eyes reflecting the discomfort born of the unknown. The camera on my head, a symbol of omnipresent surveillance, strikes a chord of unease. They quicken their pace as if hoping to outpace the all-seeing lens. In their wary gazes, I see echoes of a society conditioned to be perpetually watched, ever wary of my gaze.

Others, however, find a sense of macabre entertainment in my peculiar spectacle. They exchange knowing glances and hushed laughter, their amusement tinged with a hint of irony.

To them, I am an unwitting performer in a grotesque show, a living embodiment of the absurdity of our surveillance culture. They revel in the spectacle of the absurd, the uncanny juxtaposition of the familiar and the bizarre.

This man double-takes as we cross paths, I then see him lock his gaze forward, just another perception through surveilling eyes.

Yet, curiosity is the driving force behind the collective gaze. Faces turn toward me, eyes widening with a mixture of fascination and bewilderment. Some prefer to ignore my presence, if they look away long enough I no longer exist. They are drawn to the paradox of surveillance turned on its head — a performer embracing the panopticon rather than succumbing to it.

In this amalgamation of reactions, one can discern the contradictions of a society under constant surveillance. The discomfort, the entertainment, the curiosity — they’re all threads in the intricate tapestry of our surveillance state. The individual performances enacted on a day-to-day basis are founded on the labels we choose to accede to.

In this Orwellian landscape, I, the artist with a camera for a head, become both a reflection and a critique of the society that surrounds us. The public’s response, a manifestation of their own ambivalence toward the watchful eye, serves as a stark reminder of the complex relationship between the individual and the ever-present lens of authority. What performances do we all choose to enact, and what “free will” do we choose to suppress in fear of being judged or worse, held accountable for?

It was within this crucible of adversity that I’m reminded of Solomon Asch’s conformity experiments positing that individuals conform to group norms to gain social approval or avoid social disapproval. Normative social influence preys on your every move documented by the eyes of the buildings that surround us.

18

Continuing my journey, I take my first glance through the glass inside; a gathering of citizens huddled around a piece of art, their hushed voices probably filled with trepidation as they cover their mouths, for the fear that their artistic interpretation is wrong. There is always one inflicting their interpretation upon others, I distinguish him through the simple movement of his animated mouth. It’s not just me, the camera scrutinises their faces, searching for any signs of dissent or rebellion. In this world, even the appreciation of art is subject to scrutiny, dictating what is acceptable and what is not.

The only proof of my performance and presence are the establishment’s CCTV tapes and records, the black and white film photographs I had developed, and the memory of the public.

This performance follows an exhibition where the camera was hung from the ceiling, fully functioning and used as a live-streaming device. The body of the audience member entering the camera was used as the vessel subject and object to surveillance.

In Part II, I vowed to bring my piece and vision to life through direct surveillance of the public; their reactions an insight into the performance we all partake in to conform to societal norms. Through all of this, I indulged myself in the Glitch Studies Manifesto by Rosa Menkemen; my exhibition piece made reference to her manifesto and I count my performance as a continuation of the glitch art in question. Although this started as an artistic observation and subversion of surveillance in public spaces, I am now an unwilling performer on this concrete stage to the surveillance of the Barbican and the City of London. So when you notice me watching you, don’t forget to smile. Go on, and put on your best performance.

Words & Photos

Sofia Alvarez Manilla Hernandez

19

and suddenly it dawns on me that

FitzroyWords

Zoe Hercus

Imagine me Please

As the lamps turn on and the soft curling of the bulb finds me wanting with my tongue waiting to catch sweet honey sediment and suddenly it dawns on me that and forgive that from the Vanguard to Fitzroy Alleyway I smeared Maybelline Crimson I was caught like a fishhook in the soft dab of my lower lip.

Crash a splash of crystalline and suddenly it dawns on me that spectral and lovely spreading like the memory of a star lovely under the crunch of a boot who broke the bulb finds and forgets I have been here with my tongue waiting.

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and suddenly it dawns on me that

I see the dawning

21 and suddenly it dawns on me that

and suddenly it dawns on me that

Stop and suddenly it da Shhhhhhhh wns on me that I am engulfed in the breaking seas of an alleyway I can never seem to leave I am mixed in with the Maybelline Crimson my palms are raised to sky my aching feet are pierced by glass.

I stay Please Stretched out on the pavement fingertips rubbed raw on the aging stone listening to how King Street changes as the lamps turn on my hungry tongue still waiting And suddenly it dawns on me that I have been here my whole life.

and suddenly it dawns on me that

A

esrever ni gnitnusdaroH W ydenneK eilrahC

s s I write this, I have been moved out for a month now. The weeks since have been a maternal withdrawal period. Coming off antidepressants has been comparable to ‘coming off’ Mum, which I have been doing concurrently. It is an ache in my heart, a sting in the nose.

A haunting in reverse, an emptiness in the hands. I wish to share what it’s like to leave home as an only child to a single mum, with all of its inescapable, throat-gulping guilt.

My family was an equilateral triangle. It was never ‘the kids,’ with their cyclical milestones. Frilly dresses handed down to the next little body, teddies' lives extended by a few years, cuddled by different arms. It was us. There was one before me. He rests in a little gold lion box. A Leo baby, born in between Mum and I. We moved forward through life together. Dad’s gappy-toothed smile and adventurousness, mum’s blonde magnetism and emotional intelligence. Dad’s leaving welded mum and I together. Arm in arm through the terrain of teenagehood and single motherhood, we strode forward. We weren’t a family that tended to ‘activity’ on the weekend. Dad grew up in a nuclear family, healthy relationships to him were ones that did. The doing of things together has never been the way that I conceptualised familial love.

exclusively thonged feet who made spaghetti that left a ring of orange oil around your lips. Lockdown not yet announced, the decision to blend families made over salad bowls with the magician and his Irish daughter. At first it was card games, and trying to get the fireplace to stop coughing black smoke into the living room. Patisserie croissants and rating Gladys Berjiklians’ OOTDs in the morning COVID updates. Then it was green smoke floating from under the door of the bedroom that I gave up in the morning. Finding a bag of not-cocaine on the tiles by the toilet. Being informed that I didn’t see what I saw.

Mum searching for the cause of her missing money, everywhere except the guy right beside her, sleeping in jeans. We moved away from the house with the frosted glass door after that. We lent them my grandmother's quilts, never returned.

We lived in a two-bedder, close to the old place. For a few months, I tried to suppress the urge for flight that one gets at 19. Soon, my best friend offered me a room in the little but light-drenched Art Deco apartment that I helped her move into a few months prior. I shuffled into mum's doorway, and began the conversation. Her eyes widened. The alarm finally ringing, this day would always come. Her face relaxed, brave. We had a chain connected to each of our pinky fingers. It managed to stretch just far enough to Manly. It tarnished and rusted in the salty air during those eleven months spent away.

Eventually, I came home, lightly bruised. She pulled me back to I was with her when the front door slammed shut, severing him from safety and de-rusted our chain. I collapsed for a couple of months. us forever.

It was only as my body had fallen through the air and onto the soft landing she’d laid out, that I realised how very tired I was.

I squeezed her, trembling and riding the aftershocks. My dark room rattled, the makeup that filled the dresser top, the clothes on the They say that the meds are working when you start to feel like you floor, the photos which covered a whole wall. I peered through the can stop taking them. Sometimes, you have to stop taking them to crack of light and at the door. Intact. In my memory, it had been see if you still need them. It is advised by healthcare professionals slammed so hard the frosted glass shattered. The wooden frame to meet with your doctor and work out a dosage reduction schedule. burst spontaneously into flames, leaving nothing but a pile of ash and I didn’t do this. Just bit the pills into smaller and smaller pieces shards in its wake — unchanged but forever singed into my memory. each week, spitting out the powdery bitterness that coated my front teeth. For lowering my reliance on mum, there is not yet a medicallyI went to school the next day. recognised dosage reduction schedule. Mum discontinuation syndrome can cause intermittent electrical zaps that make your brain After a while, she dipped her toes in the waters of dating. The guy and the world around it pulsate. who kept mum around for free childcare. The Star Wars head with

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Haunting in reverse Words

23

Charlie Kennedy

The regression is simple. Resting my head back on her chest, becoming a part of its rise and fall. The progression is complicated.

Climbing out of that safe, warm burrow and up the stairs into a room of my own. I need a tight swaddle, a warm bottle of whole milk and a twinkly mobile to lull me into slumber. In the room of my own, I try to read. Try to write in my journal. Except I cannot concentrate like Joan Didion’s extrapolations need, or see like John Berger wants me to. Journaling means thinking about mum. So I just lay there.

The sheets feel loose from the mattress. It's a little crumby. Should I adjust the pillow? The right side feels good for a bit, then the left.

A couple more times around and the fitted sheet is well and truly off one corner. I finally get comfortable, ignoring a panging bladder.

That never works out well. But no one is coming to hum to me and rock me if I wail into the dark. God. Straining to the lamp switch placed inconveniently underneath the bedside table. Trod down the stairs, plonking onto the toilet seat in the dark. I need some blue light...

Perhaps enhanced by my not-so-fresh state at that moment, she was so lovely. My lovely mum. My only mum, who is only my mum and no one else's. Just us two. When she came to see me, the back of my mind was preoccupied with imagining when it would be time to leave. For her to leave and for me to stay here. Her grey car gliding away from me, down the lane. Turning the corner of the alleyway, vanishing.

Raising me was like raising the daughter that she wasn’t allowed to be. Her parameters of motherhood were based on what not to do.

When I was in Manly, she kept the apartment with the two bedrooms because she hadn’t had the choice of coming back when she needed it. Closed my bedroom door until I came back to open it. We both know that I am ready this time. If everything falls to pieces, she reminds me, “Just chuck your stuff in storage and come crash with me.”

Before leaving I felt consumed by my mother’s emotions. I mistook my own hypervigilance with having outgrown living at home. I don't think that was it. Her energy follows me, like dandelion seeds in my hair. I stand in the kitchen, mopping furiously towards the dark living room. In the corner are the flowers that mum brought me the day after my birthday party. A week ago now. Dusty roses, dropping snappy dragon heads, winded baby's breath. I was hungover and grumpy with her. I plonked them haphazardly into a plastic water jug. Bought to hold vodka diluted with home brand orange juice.

That afternoon at about twelve-thirty, she walked through the door of the back patio to a tableau somewhere within the realm of wholesome. We sat at the old wooden table with a spread of pancakes, strawberries and potato rostis. She sat on the corner next to me, dragging up a camp chair strewn to the side.

“This is not how my sharehouses looked the day after a party, that’s for sure.”

When she came to see me that Sunday afternoon, I saw her afresh.

There is no point in falsifying closure. Leaving is a part of life. But when you have seen and felt what it feels like to be left behind, it is devastating. Also exciting. What will fill the child-shaped hole? That is something only for her to work out, for the first time in twenty-two years.

Call her every day if you need to, she probably needs it too.

Wet Sun Words and Pictures Soleil Mistry 24

11.6

i stir like a teaspoon in a hot latte. just to pass this time we now have. could a summer ever be so grey and stormy? or did the rain stow away with me to vienna? it’s still muggy though, a shy and awkward heat. the rain is only a little cooling. what limbo-like fate it is that inhabits us on such dreamy mornings. what a hollow purgatory. reanimated by the sudden urgency to open the godforsaken window just to let some fucking air in. i’m sweating uncomfortably and the shower here is nothing but a wet rag. beautiful vienna, your toilets are so grotesque. your air is so heavy like a thick head of hair. i scrape my skin till there is a wound then i offer you a cigarette. we smoke in a brilliant silence and finally crush the stubs in another glass ashtray. you never took the little blue one from the nextdoor table outside the restaurant like you said you would. but i was too tired anyway to remind you.

13.6

on the train to prague. my long awaited sweet prague. kafka’s town. kafka’s grave. will it appear to me like an apparition? or slowly, a creeping and sneaking fog that pools cooly around my ankles before it travels up to my navel and then my chin. following the contours of my spine. what is the call to prague? i fear i romanticise even crumbs but prague is no crumb. i hate being a tourist. i want to speak the language and know all the local vulgarities. accepted by tongue. or the way i count using fingers. trains are a comfort to me. enveloped in the daydreams of passing towns and chased by the serenity of farm fields and european houses. it reminds me of the vague and desperate embrace of life and death and me, their sweet baby looks on from my crib. i must first visit prague, father. i must bask in trainviews and make lewd pictures from the clouds. the vastness of green and blue evokes illustrations of rosy cheeked blonde cherubs. children clasping hands and falling over one another in a gorgeous fit of giggles. i picture small town suicides the romance and the tragedy of a blood soaked bath mat. it is immaculate country here. pristine and preserved in my mind as fairy tales are etched in gold trim. but i am only a pervert here. a delusional voyeur.

17.6

the clouds appear a light lavender grey against a midnight sky. they carry the thunderstorms of tomorrow. i smoke a slim vogue in the dark, like i will when the rain comes the next day in the shelter of one of pragues many arches. my mind winds like a strangling vine. trying desperately to get ahead. to reach that life giving sun. we all just want a taste of her, all us condemned angels. when i cry now its like a rapid which i am tumbling into and drowns me. its like the burst of thunder that will shake and open the sky to a downpour of flood water. swift as a crocodile. unsuspecting as a swamp. these stars will always remember this moment and they will always remember us. the clouds glaze my eyes, pretty and full of dew and a sorrow of poets and whale song. there is a thickness in my throat, but its just you. the stickiness of goodbyes and of memory grave digging. blood pours out of me. i am an empty vessel again and again to be refilled with the rain and the humid hungry summer. this cycle consumes me. the moon knows only of my weeping and she will keep my secrets safe in her round belly. till the time comes… i have to be candid. mostly because there is nothing else left to impersonate but myself and the spiky, sour truth. my lungs are full of clouds. they keep me warm when i forget my jacket like i will in the morning. again and again.

18.6

people watching. i peer ruthlessly from behind my darkened eyes. observing and absorbing like film. make an impression i am begging you, look into the blazing sun of my face and seek out my sunken eyes and caress me with a little supervision, hold me in your heart for a precious moment, my sweet passer-by. i wont mind if you’re ugly or scared, that makes you all the more gentle in this summer light. no dont come any closer! i’ll be frightened and hole away inside my cave. just watch me and i will reflect your gaze and we will be in a beautiful bubble of only us and i will build a home out of mud and straw that we can bake in until the rains come to wash our little world away. on you go, unbothered by my childish games. untethered by my wistful gaze. it was just for a lark. dont be upset with me. who next shall fall prey to me, eyes hunting in the crowd for a face, full and lonely as my own. one misstep and its a hefty plunge of shame. a pain of eyes groping me amidst the dumb and careless crowd. i pretend i am the slinking hungry cat, but in my core lives a dreaming mouse.

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26

19.6

final day in prague. goodbye to the black and white cobblestones. to the patterns they make and the bruises they leave on the soles of my soft feet. love bites and goodnight kisses. and to the cathedrals and churches and their regal decorated organs i bid you farewell. to the turrets and fortresses of a rich brown brick, their gold trims and flirtations. goodbye to the saints and sinners of prague. goodbye to kafka and his cubist grave. to all the cubist graves and names that rest here. goodbye to conversations and the tears that accompanied them. i beg us to depart. goodbye to the thunderstorms and to the shelter we took within them. i am full of you, prague. full to the edge of my limits and it is almost sickly. i love you and your gently carved innards. the beige and yellows of their hues. i took pictures of even the dog shits left in your most feminine streets. to remember even the smells and pornography i met here in such a monumental town. goodbye i wave with tears in my misty eyes, like any fanciful tourist. goodbye in english, since i don’t know the words in czech.

23.6

timid and gentle as a rabbit, i was holed in my darkened burrow while the sky shook the walls around me and performed its fabulous disaster for us. such little creatures we are in the face of the opening clouds and the tremendous roar that escapes wet and despairing jaws. the room flickers nervously, my eyes seem to short circuit and you are laughing like a maniac. i love this moment. this night so full and alive, refusing slumber. i want to swim in the drenched sky and drown above the city of berlin and you would watch the show from these trembling windows. i love to perform for you. when the guy at the hostel came up to me and warned me of a great storm i knew the seeds of panic and beauty were sown. the perfect conditions for mania and drama. and i ran giggling back to the cabin to prepare for passage to another blessed plane.

24.6

at an art show rave in berlin. theres a cow made of metal with a latex pussy and anus cut out and gloves and lube so you can fist it and squelch your hands in its guts. it stands solo in the middle of the dance floor. i watch people one by one don the sleeve-length plastic glove and plunge up to their shoulders into the indifferent cow. i want to go near it myself but im enjoying my wall flowering. my documentation. to my right there are a few people doing lines of speed off an iphone. they cut and cough. cut and cough. the cow is a silent figure through it all. a photo of paris hilton, poster-sized, leans on a shelf behind the bar. she wears a corset and gazes down at us seductively from under the glow of red lights. further along a crack in the bathroom door reveals a line of blue which emanates toward the dance floor. the air is hot with drug bodies and laughter and the fans work hard to suppress the fever, which is sure only to grow and burn faster as the night deepens. the cow will not run in the face of flickering flames.

3.7

sitting in the oude kerk. it’s the last day. and to spend at least a little while in such a heavenly place. sculpted right out of shimmering waves of stone. its old wooden curves remember an evolution of dutch faces in prayer. this is my favourite church. lets leave a few cells here. the tip of my pinky fingernail. let them multiply until a little fleshy form has taken shape. taken residence in the stormy floor. this place is elemental. wide and empty. it dwarfs me until i am so small that you can finally just pick me up between your thumb and forefinger and swallow me whole. ill be warm and safe in your pink insides and then we’ll never have to part. wooden beams stretch over us. weathered from the flooding tears of god as he looks down upon all the lovers who love each other so much that they must return one another to the wild of their free and lonely lives. he watches and weeps. he mustn’t ever turn away. the earth is big but his church is bigger. it holds in its impossible hands all the oceans and licks the salty water. i want to sleep here. curled up on the cold stone with not even as much as a blanket. and when i wake, covered in a brilliant array of bruises i will finally be holy. baptised and pure of all the pain and love we have given one another.

27

I

have reached that age now where my friends and family have begun to stress the importance of self-reflection, of learning to delegate my time wisely and concisely, as though the passage of time had never occurred until that fateful day on which I blew out the candles on my thirty-second birthday cake — and so my fate was sealed.

At the end of our session, Roy and I agree upon several things: I should frequent the local gym, utilise meditative podcasts, take note of things in an overpriced journal, and lie about my age to strangers.

“I do think that these comments come from a place of love, Ida. Don’t you think the people closest to you just want to see you succeed?”

Hi– not with her right now, try calling her later maybe?

11:49 am. I am emptying the bins when he messages me.

Ida, can you have mum call me? She’s not picking up. Thanks, Dad. “You’d think I might as well be in palliative care,” I tell Roy, my middle-aged psychologist of middling looks, who regards me quietly At a young age I came to learn, just as my mother did, that my father from the confines of his navy Arne Jacobsen chair, “with all this talk was always a guest in his own home. Perhaps it was cathartic for of lifelong meaning and soul-searching.” him, taking off without warning, chasing something beyond the confines of the canning factory. But for us, his frequent departures I am open enough to recount the excruciating details of a nightmare left much to be desired. I remember countless evenings spent coiled that has been plaguing me as of late, but too afraid to admit that around the upstairs balustrade, balancing myself on folded toes as I I think these concerns about my age are something regurgitated listened for the sound of keys, the latch on the door, anything at all. to most women like me, thirty-somethings that teeter on the I let my tears drip down my face without shame, so that if he had cusp of sterility and perpetual single-hood, threatening genuine happened to return at any moment then, he could see that my anger incompetence. I know I’ve had my fill of desperation. I have taken was tangible. It was real, not feigned. I mattered. up day drinking, taken up chain-smoking. I have let men far younger than myself bend me over and fuck me in the hope that it would In my adulthood, I try to conjure up a gentler image. A man and impart some youth or worth onto me that I so clearly lacked. There is woman sit next to one another, reconciling. Like Atlas, I desperately no need for me to elaborate on this to Roy, to cement the hysterics. try to hold up both ends.

“Despite my apparent inadequacy, I’m really quite content with where I’m at. I’m happy, and in some ways, you know… that’s success enough to me.”

I hadn’t heard from him in over a decade, and yet here we were now, shifting our ground inch-by-inch via text– Is she working a lot lately? She hasn’t called in three days. Worried she’s miffed at me.

Against the backdrop of a book-lined shelf, Roy’s Harvard medical graduate plaque looks down at me, a comic knife held taut against my throat.

“I see,” he regards me with quiet scepticism. “And this disturbing dream you’ve been having, do you think it’s somewhat rooted in concerns regarding your self-worth?”

I am forced to remember it back again. The Sellotape-tear of flesh.

A woman lying in the garden. Her palms upturned and the faint, sinister humming of blowflies. That snaking incision running from her neck to her upper thigh in vile continuum.

“I think I’m just in mourning about not being able to drink without repercussions any longer. I have a shot or two on a night out, and I know the next morning that I’ll be spending my Sunday draped over the toilet bowl.”

“Right.”

In your late thirties, your body is like fruit — you become soft and fleshy, malleable and imperfect. People pick you up, turn you over, scrutinise you and inspect you with distaste. Your value flounders on the rocks of uncertainty, and you must learn to maintain your composure as you dangle somewhere over the crevasse between those two essential points, ripeness and ruin; a weathered branch that beckons.

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Words Alexa

Hansen Weeks

Dependency –two sparring fencers struggling to define the nature of our relationship.

Heard they’re short staffed. Probably just working overtime.

My elderly neighbour, Miss Simmons with the yappy little peke, greets me as I wheel out the garden bins.

“You look well dear. Lovely dress, that one.”

A blatant lie. I had sprinkled on enough heavy-duty powder to coat my face for all eternity, but no amount could conceal the hideous shadows beneath my eyes.

I think of the woman in the dream again, of how lucky I am to have slept at all.

I have faced a horrifying evil with relative indifference and strength, as a florist would, arranging the stems in a vase filled with blood.

“Thank you, Joan.”

I sense she is lonely and disenfranchised by the recent emulsion of an expensive divorce and her increasingly geriatric appearance. It must be miserable, to be stripped of everything.

Your children, your husband, your identity. The grey argyle knit in the peak of Summer really isn’t helping her case, though.

“Any plans over the Summer holidays?”

I stop to lean against the wooden fence. “None as of yet. I’m itching for some excitement though. Maybe I’ll go abroad for a week, see some friends or something. What about you?”

“I’ve taken up bridge with some friends, so I have that to look forward to now.”

Joining a bridge group before the age of sixty is the social equivalent of killing yourself gently, but I don’t say that.

Instead I say, “Sounds like a hoot,” and we both laugh at that.

My phone chimes again.

Ida, call me please. It’s urgent.

“Hang on a minute, Joan — just a second.” I gesture to the phone, and she nods and waves me away with a glove-clad hand, turning her undivided attention toward an overgrown rosebush.

Work called and Celia hasn’t been in since last Tuesday.

Is he genuinely concerned? He sounds sincere now, but certainly wasn't all those years ago, so then again, I am unsure of the merit of the whole thing.

Busy right now — she’s probably just sick. Don’t stress.

I think of his departure, his subsequent reentry, and how they act as bookends in my life, with every other insignificant event filling the gaps in between. I should be happy that he’s making an effort.

She would’ve called in sick.

But I’m not.

In his absence, my father taught me many things. How people tend to be fickle, how quickly we learn to mistrust. How we impart inexplicable judgement onto things as trivial as outward appearances. How, beneath all that skin, our insides are remarkably similar, and that there is no need for appraisal after all.

I open the lid of the bin. Mum looks up at me, her mouth unhinged, unmoving. I gently run a finger along those coarse, pale lips; lines that have never been softened by tender, loving words.

That could be me, I think, but not just yet, and I am relieved for it.

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ThePANO Historically, the Panorama was patented by Robert Barker in 1787. A new type of image, different from the conventional still oil painting, the viewer of the panorama must move.

Stephen Oetterman in his book The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium (1980) locates the Panorama as a novelty in the history of images. Its patenting places it alongside technical innovations of the 18th and 19th century such as the steam engine, automobile, and telephone.

While the panorama was largely a novelty, I want to stress the technical nature of this expansive image. Panorama’s were intended to be incredibly dense and accurate; only with a richness of information synthesised could the viewer be transported elsewhere through the image.

Realism and accuracy define the panorama as it occured in history. In its form the digital panorama contains the DNA of the informationally dense historic panorama, for the JPEG is a grid of values. However, the digital offers an inversion of this accuracy, stretching, glitching, clipping, and skipping details as the image algorithm tries to smooth out the jitter of my hands. These “breaks” in the digital image reveal the untruth and unrealism of its construction.

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RAMA

Report

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Your phone is hungry for the world, hungry to consume everything in front of you. Regular images are no longer enough, we must survey, collate, stitch together.

The panorama resists posting and being displayed. Irony of a form not even being fully viewable in it’s taking.

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33 The hilarity of the vertical panorama, mirroring the ways we survey each other, looking one and other “up and down”

Photos and Words Simon Harris

UNDRESSED TO IMPRESS!

HANS WEGNER’S PP250 VALET CHAIR: THIS CHAIR “WASN’T REALLY MADE FOR SITTING” HE SAYS HE’D RATHER SHOW US THEN TELL US HOW TO BALANCE ON HIS THREE LEGS!

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Imagining childhood in Lebak Siliwangi

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PhotosAshray Kumar

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I

n June of 2023, I had the opportunity to travel to Lebak Siliwangi, an informal settlement in rural Indonesia. I conducted on-site ethnographic research over two weeks, exploring the significance of the area’s local informal economy. It was during this time that I had the opportunity to document the village and the lives of its residents.

Through my photos, often featuring strangers, I aim to capture the subtleties of the human condition: their emotions, and the stories that often go unnoticed. Drawing inspiration from the dark and gritty work of Daido Moriyama, this photo series intentionally juxtaposes the youthful children within a Moriyama-esque visual style, mirroring the contradicting aura of past and present that enveloped Lebak Siliwangi.

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39

Scene of the Crime

Words Harry Gay

40

olicing and art have very little or even a detective noting down his thoughts in common. Art often serves as for playback later on a tiny cassette tape (a the personal expression of an precursor to the true crime podcast?), the act individual; it holds meaning, of policing becomes an art in of itself visually, it is freeing, it expands consciousnesses sculpturally and sonically. and reflects the world around us. The act of policing is very nearly the opposite. Policing The 1948 film He Walked by Night captures is rarely the expression of the individual; the art of policing in a manner unlike it serves only to facilitate the strict rules anything I’ve ever seen. Having disguised a of oppressive states, and holds very little portion of his face at each crime scene, the meaning, or rather, it carries with it a violent robber has been seen by a variety of people history of Colonial invasion and dispossession but only in bits and pieces. Gathering all the that upholds Capitalist systems. Policing is witnesses, the police show the room a variety forceful, violent, and brutish. While art can of sketches, breaking down the face into be these things it is largely done so as a way miscellaneous eyes, noses, mouths, and hairs. to comment on the ideas mentioned above — It’s a brilliant sequence of deconstruction and as is the case with Concretism, which arose in reconstruction as you slowly piece together a post-Fascist Europe recovering from WW2. what the culprit looks like.

P

Art, in its purest sense, is to create, while policing, is to destroy.

But these are the most obvious examples.

Where you will find the more evocative moments of artistic creation is in the scene of the crime itself. Murder, suicide, death, dispute, violent encounters, collisions, and derailments — crime scenes and their representations present the most furtile ground as locations that hold extreme importance, both emotional and symbolic.

And yet, these two worlds cannot help but intersect. No, I’m not talking about someone quiveringly calling “Security!” when your favourite Impressionist painting gets souped or the droves of police procedurals that proliferate on our television screens. Rather, I am fascinated by the ways in which art is often incorporated in the practices of police When a police officer walks onto the scene of a crime, it is their job to piece together what work itself, how officers of the law and the state can unwittingly create art through, what happened. The place becomes a temporal is for them, just an average part of their job. zone, a site where something happened here, a violent fissure between life and death, past Be it a sketch artist creating a pencilled and future, and this aura carries through in mock-up of a supposed perp, someone taking the varied figurations of these spaces. As a plaster mould of a footprint at a murder site, police create impressions of these places for

Still from He Walked By Night

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further investigations, they imprint on these visuals the essence of the crime scene itself.

Crime scene photography is very much about this strange temporality. Police photographs are often about the absences, what’s not there, an implied action not present. Men standing around a field in suits, roads vectoring off into the distance, empty rooms and silent backyards. The photographs are very straightforward, used to collect evidence or get the bearing of a space. It is in these barebones ‘noting of the facts’ that we can find meaning.

According to Peter Doyle in Suburban Noir, police photography began as large pieces that served to get a bearing of the whole scene. As camera equipment became lighter they switched to the hand-held Speed Graphic, or ‘press camera’, and we began to see how they saw the world (“We see the gaze itself”).

Evidence was now submitted as a series of intimate close-ups that made up a crime scene. These single shots capture both the “restless movements of everyday life” and the “small routines of household life”, yet “the mood of the photos is of the aftermath”, and “there’s nothing to do now but bear witness to what remains.”

Road markings and tire scratches intersecting on a curved street become the “modernist angles, hard-edged shapes”, “converging parallels” and “odd diagonals” that transform gumshoe into “abstract expressionists”. Detectives moving through or merely observing the space become “ristualistic”, “monkish”, and statue-like in the way they do their “duty”. Houses become a list-like simulacrum of “cigarette pack on a table”, “pair of glasses by a bed”, “single shoe”, “dislodged placemat”. If the police are presenting a vision of the world, it is a “relentlessly nihilist[ic]” one.

Teju Cole similarly ponders the way conflict photography captures “domestic objects whose meaning has been altered in the aftermath of a calamity.” In their essay ‘Object Lesson’, they look at the work of Ukrainian photographer Sergei Ilnitsky, describing a “still

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life [...] in utter disarray” as objects in a kitchen are left broken and dust is collected everywhere.

“Domestic objects imply use, and Ilnitsky’s photograph pulls our minds toward the now lost tranquillity of the people who owned these items.”

The same can be said of the crime scene.

The photos spark us as viewers to ponder the use of the supposed “cigarette pack on a table”, “pair of glasses”, “single shoe”. As Cole writes, “the absence of people in the photograph makes room for these questions.”

and archival into an interactive work of art.

Nowadays, the crime scene has gone even further into the realm of the digital.

Universities and courtrooms the world over are now using VR technology to plonk students and jurors into the scenes of the crime. Even avid gamers and armchair detectives at home can experience the sensation of mulling over shell casings and muddy footprints in games such as CSI VR and projects by ScanLab. According to the developers of the unimaginatively named “Crime Scene” for Guardian VR, their technology encompasses everything “[f]rom homicides to road traffic collisions [...] Its extraordinary level of detail captures both the space and its contents in millimeter [sic] accuracy.”

Viewers are now rendered even more ghost-like as we can move about incorporeally through the hyper-realistic and hyperdetailed replicas of actual murder victims homes, presented in all their binary, pixelated glory.

While the technology brings us closer in proximity to the scene of the crime, unlike the detailed but miniscule design of Lee’s Nutshell series or the impenetrable photograph, they also risk creating greater apathy among those who step into this realm.

What are we then left with? The Beyond photography, the crime scene has police are still an oppressive force, and been rendered in glorious detail, albeit yet these works stir something within me. miniaturised, in the Nutshell Studies of Cole points to the way these art objects Unexplained Death by Frances Glessner Lee. can bring about change “in the core of the Despite being intended to teach aspiring sympathetic self.” With these works granting officers of the law to observe and sift us “however modest a degree, some kind of evidence from a crime scene through model solace.” Regardless of the aims of the police, mock-ups, these works deserve to be seen less the artistic impulses of these works inspire in the context of police departments but rather hope, one that yearns for change and greater the gallery walls or curated museum. empathy for victims of suffering. Hopefully, it can peek through the cracks of the black and Lee’s scenes transform the once fragmented white. nature of evidentiary photographs into holistic three-dimensional spaces that one can view God-like over, affording the viewer an omnipresence hitherto untold. And yet, one must sharpen their eye, adopt the “gaze” of the detective in order to piece together what occurred. It shifts what was once oblique, flat

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Nutshell Studies, 1945 Francis Glassner Lee

Will Art History remember Furry Porn?

A

Words Amelia Franklin

words formed the tapestry of my imagination violent. Days spent at the screen. A mouse dear pastime of mine and my and trickling binary scattered to form the rich dragged across the desk. Discordant lines friends’ is to cast our gaze to digital landscape. Paper and an LCD display. threatening to leap from the page. Black yesteryears and crack our ribs laughing at the pure distilled cringe Analog and digital. Long ago, the two nations muddy airbrush. Retina-sizzling colours.

Program crashes leaving me in the quiet ash lived in harmony. that was our early entries onto the internet: of my own creations. JPEGs swarmed my flower – crown Snapchats taken with iPod desktop, as a floodgate was opened and the touches, chainmail hearts drawn to decree our One decision threatened to change it all. sympathy for cancer patients, Youtube videos The 64x64 icon for FireAlpaca peeked over distilled contents of my mind took form in the digital space. the hypergreen hill of Bliss. My brother where the lone commenter was our mums, and Musical.ly accounts we swore were had recommended this software to me.

My overflowing confidence prompted me to It allowed you to create digital drawings. famous back in the day. begin sharing my creations on the internet.

Digital images. Like, my art could really DeviantArt was likely not the safest sect, exist. Properly. It wasn’t something I could 2012: my brain had freshly grown in and I had only just gained agency over my limbs. completely comprehend, but I was intrigued. but it allowed me to construct a raft on The respite of the weekends meant it was Surely I would get sick of it and return to the the void of the bottomless web. Drifting time to spend daylight scrawling dragons art and the digital world I was familiar with. aimlessly, broadcasting drawings of any into copy paper, and nights leaning Separate things. Each realm was so peaceful whim to propel me forward, I encountered into the glow of my dad’s Windows on its own, surely the product would be just travellers who had also obtained the ability doubly peaceful. I clicked the icon. It was to will their imagination into life through X. Spidery threads of image and

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synthetic brushstrokes and neon colours.

Vessels crowded my passage – I went with many others, past 2016’s animation meme epidemic, 2020s infatuation with boba, and now at 2023s cyber nostalgia. Sometimes I would encounter an ancient nomad from the early 2000s bearing withered scrolls of their Warrior Cats OCs.

kitsch. But the internet remembers.

kitschy renderings of celestial bodies and imaginations of Seth Price mirrors the notion that the internet freedom. Through the survival has transformed art. He regards himself as of the internet and the cultures it “earlier” in representing the confluence of art fosters, digital kitsch will live on. So maybe and the digital medium in the early 2000s. I in a century, furry porn will indeed be suppose he had found residence under a large remembered by art history. and very insulative rock during this time as the internet was already creating spaces Formally, digital kitsch encompasses all for sharing and creating art, for example works of art created digitally, more often DeviantArt which was founded in 2000. those of low-modality. However, I personally Price frames his perspective of internet art define Digital Kitsch as digital works of art on the canvas. This item sits on the wall of made in indulgence, self-expression, or trade. his studio, and appears in exhibitions only They can be high-quality, such as available for his peers. He proudly lacks a @clockbirds’ furry portraits backdropped social media presence and is discussed only by captivating landscapes, or they can be within elite spheres of art. He represents the low-modality, such as @crushing_on_ technological identity, yet denounces it by spongebob’s gaudy self-insert OC ship art holding it at a distance from his practice. with the eponymous Spongebob Squarepants.

Despite the visual dissonance between Internet artist Qing Han, better known as such works, I would consider them both @qinniart, uses pen and pencil to create digital kitsch. For the garish works of @ celestial-themed character art which are crushing_on_spongebob, this assignment is coloured digitally and shared on Instagram. obvious, however, if you have had the honour Qinni tragically lost her battle with cancer of seeing @clockbirds’ art you may criticise in early 2020. Her passing shook the entire this categorisation as their art is created with internet art community. Under the Instagram resemblance to fine art. hashtag #galaxiesforqinni, there are over Work by @clockbirds twelve thousand posts which form a tribute to All digital work produced on the internet is Qinni’s presence as a beloved internet artist. fated to become kitsch, no matter the level of The tributes ripple beyond Instagram and are elegance or skill with which it is executed. As also seen on Deviantart, Twitter, and Tumblr. technology and technique advances, cutting- The style of her artworks has become kitsch edge artworks march towards their date of in the eyes of shifting fads, the tendencies of expiry. The pride with which an artist views a digital art moving away from blue and purple work is inevitably soured to terse endearment galaxies. However, her art is expansive in its by the rapid cycle of progress. The evil witch cultural value, representing the unique sense drawing which I was enthralled by five years of community that blossoms in the online art ago now appears nauseatingly airbrushed, sphere. effects-abused, and obsolete. Digital works are afflicted by the fast-paced fads of the Where Price peers in, Qinni demonstrates. internet. This ensures that styles of digital art The life of Qinni’s art will last as long as cycle in and out of fashion quickly. the internet and its citizens. Price’s works, existing only physically and in limited images Though the time-worn pieces no longer online, will inevitably be drowned in the sea present their original appeal, they become of elitist art which homogeneously attempts to artefacts of the digital age of art. Ramshackle suggest meaning from arbitrary smatterings pngs clodded together with the skills, of digital assets. forms, and influence available at the time Work by @qinniart incidentally represents the unique zeitgeist of In the year 2999, people will roam the chrome that point in internet art. In the mad scramble corridors of an art museum. Instead of gazing to become more out of touch than their upon snobby computer collage, fanart of ancestors, art elites produce appropriations long forgotten characters made on MSPaint of internet culture. From the perches of will adorn every nook. Instead of digitally meritocracy, they produce art which attempts textured sculptures, tapestries of anime cat to overwrite the products of the internet art boy-sonas will be draped lavishly on the community. But digital kitsch is alive, angry, walls. Maybe instead of exhibiting Price’s and demanding to be remembered. Art elites pedestrian insights into digital art, there dismiss internet artists, they forget digital will be a showcase of Qinni’s affectionately

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The soundtrack of

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and other songs to run over to Words

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Huw Bradshaw

Y

Despite having the ability to rob, murder ou’re tearing down the Great Ocean Highway. Cara Delevingne and go to strip clubs (all supposedly alluring activities to my underdeveloped 15-year-old screams some page 6 parable in your ear. Lady (Hear me Tonight) mind) the vast majority of time I sunk into playing Grand Theft Auto games was spent blares as you narrowly miss another SUV. driving around listening to the radio. When You’re easily making 120 and need to go I turned 16, I did this in lieu of progressing faster. One traffic cop among the rabble of my real life L’s license: eat your heart pigs behind you howls on the loudspeaker, beckoning you to pull over. It’s almost dinner. out Baudrillard. Before I was ever really I - can - tell - by - the - look - in - your - eyes. interested in FBi or 2ser, I was listening You can’t hear a thing. All you hear is Modjo. to Non Stop Pop FM and Liberty Rock Britney. Cara. You’ve hardly left your room Radio. More so than any RYM review or / mu/ thread, my music taste was influenced in days. Faster. growing up by Channel X, Radio Broker and Flash FM. This song is in GTA IV, I hear across the share-house-party kitchen. More a crumbling monument than a final bastion of the vulgar In the style of Frank Zappa — or perhaps more lovingly, of Ween — these in-game American satire wave, such a reference is radio stations form a strange mix of parody seemingly all that remains next to slowly disappearing South Park reruns and the odd and tribute to various music genres and Adult-Swim branded drug paraphernalia. The subcultures. Cara Delevingne, host of Non lone and level sands stretch far away, etc, etc. Stop Pop FM, plays the part (a charitable use of the phrase) of a hyper-hipster-poptimist DJ, dropping lines like “Smile, be happy, Over an almost 26 year run, the cultural dance, laugh, please!” and “Anyone who space Grand Theft Auto has occupied is an ever evolving one; a boogie man for middle- doesn’t like pop music is a superior, smug, class parents, an endorsement of misogynistic self-satisfied wanker!” in between Black Eyed Peas and Fergie. In GTA IV’s Liberty violence, and the best-selling product of an Rock Radio, Iggy Pop plays (again, hardly) a industry built on extreme exploitation and grizzled old school rocker disillusioned with trampling of workers rights. Yet, above all these glaringly detestable aspects, as well as a younger generation: “Surfing the internet the game’s main objectives — theft, violence, on your phone, what a great invention — updating your social networking page as you and money — it is remembered by most walk into traffic!” he yells between Bon Jovi young people for its soundtrack.

and Mötley Crüe.

You’re cruising through the Las Venturas main strip as George Clinton ‘Loopzilla’ reverberates through your cadillac. The city lights blind you on the new family TV, a Sony 40 inch passed down by the better-off cousins. New age graphics, beams of light reflecting and refracting across every pixel: your car is written and directed by Michael Mann. It’s 37 degrees this Boxing Day, but you don’t care, because the blinds are shut and you’re finally allowed to play a now seven year old game.

in my ears. The muscle memory of holding down the d-pad and flicking the right stick to 3:30 still remains strong, and some of my favourite bands were found in late night dirt biking sessions blasting Descendents and Black Flag.

You’re bombing it down Mt. Chiliad on the tiniest little motorbike you could get your hands on. ‘AMOEBAAAAAA, AMOEBAAAAAA’ The Adolescents roar through your shitty TV speakers. Like every other time you’ve done it, your jump is perfect, but something is wrong; this time you’re Twenty-One, not Fifteen. It all feels a bit barren.

“It’s like Kant said: you can be an active originator of experience or a passive recipient of perception. I tell the fellas behind the The eerie emptiness of early game worlds diner that all the time” says Mary-Bell like GTA San Andreas is a topic already Maybeth, host of GTA San Andreas’ K-Rose discussed at length. Yet, unlike other games Radio. Like a million other things, the line that face this phenomenon (often Half-Life 2 probably went over my head when I was and other source engine games) the post-story thirteen. Flying over my head, too, was the experience of GTA games is one of solitude, fact that I happened to be experiencing one not horror (discounting one particular theory of the last instances such effort was put into of a bigfoot NPC hidden deep within the mere parody. Fifteen years and a hundred San Andreas countryside.) Perhaps it is million late-night-host Trump impressions this contrast between a seemingly living, later, the idea that someone might actually breathing cultural world found in your car put genuine wit or originality into their radio and the empty world your car inhabits satire seems fantastical. John Oliver and that provokes such a distinctly melancholic every other clapter comedian wishes they feeling of flânerie. It feels obvious to anyone could write throwaway sketches as good who has picked up a game for more than five as the “Executive Intruder Extermination minutes that if video games are ever to be Service” ad-break for an audience of preconsidered ‘art’, the site of production will pubescent teenagers and unemployed twenty- be in the interaction between artwork and somethings that only care about running over audience. No matter what a slew of 2013 one more pedestrian. articles say about The Last of Us signalling the beginning of the medium’s inclusion as This attention to detail really thrives where art, the Playstation ‘movie-game’ mode of it pushes into the niche. Switching to storytelling ignores what makes the form Radio Broker, one of many iterations of the unique and interesting, not to mention the ‘hipster radio station’ appearing through the story essentially being a B-Grade ripoff of series, you find a time capsule of Brooklyn- The Road. It is in the GTA franchise that bohemian alternative and electronic rock this phenomenon is particularly evident. circa 2008: UNKLE, The Black Keys, and In all my hours playing the games, it is LCD Soundsystem all blast through your never in the over the top, South Park-esque hijacked sports car. Once, scrambling for a story missions that the most meaningful crowd-pleasing playlist at a family gathering, experiences are found, but when idly cruising I threw on the KULT FM playlist that around the map, listening to the radio. Here happened to be in my recently played. I knew is the medium used at its best: the player and the first track to come on — Baby I Love You creator are equal partners in the production So by Colourbox — was a hit when my uncle of meaning. spoke the universal oldhead sign of approval: “I haven’t heard this song since the 90s.”

Grand Theft Auto and the milieu that produced it is dying a slow and silent death.

My favourite will always be Channel Though nobody will say it, we all know X. Before I even press triangle to hijack the pre-emptively lionised GTA VI will some hick’s pickup, I can already hear The never truly work, its predecessor having Circlejerks or Millions of Dead Cops ringing barely caught the tail end of late naughties

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‘offensive’ comedy. Now the generation that still thinks Daniel Tosh and Chris Lilley are the world's greatest comedians all have fulltime jobs. I for one am very happy to see that era fade into obscurity, though one must truly have no heart to not mourn it even a little.

‘Hipsters are annoying’ and ‘is this burger vegan?’ as jokes in and of themselves define the early 10s as much as any Arcade Fire or Vampire Weekend album.

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“Soundtrack of my childhood,” my Dad opines as Blind Faith plays on the radio. I hear my Mum say the same for Yellow Brick Road, my uncle The Specials. When I think of the soundtrack of my childhood, will I think of stealing cars, gunning down cops, Vespucci Beach, lying to my parents about what games I played on my friends’ Xbox, wanton misogyny, Niko’s fading American Dream, all at 150 kmph? Too late, I guess.

The defining feature of such a soundtrack is its aversion to curation: it is predetermined, decided before you were even born. Was the game over before it even began for me? Will my memories all eventually boil down to algorithmic addiction and base consumerism?

Was it ever more than that for anyone? The answer to these questions is simple: shut up, my favourite song is playing, who cares, roll with it.

Specs of my core, Inspired by works by Youssef Nabil, Shahin Alipour, Lalla Essaydi and Shirin Neshat, this series of photographs explores the beauty of seemingly ‘paradoxical’ intersecting identities; being from the SWANA region, queer, religious/non-religious – a child of diaspora existing in the uncertainty between eastern and western culture.

Lines of poetry exploring nuances of displacement, privilege and value of community overlay parts of the image, converging to create a collage of selfdiscovery and new-found belonging in those alike.

Models:

Sara El Youghun Felix Officer-McIntyre Paul Zaki Lydia Adriaans

Stylist:

Sara El Youghun

Assist:

Felix Officer-McIntyre

Written component:

Written in prose by Max Chahine Rewritten into poetry in Modern Standard Arabic by Junnade Ali & Jocelyne Chahine

Exploding outwards.

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Photos Max Chahine

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1.

My upbringing is a memory, Of an ocean of what is and what isn’t.

And I have now found myself further submerged, Below waves of asynchronous truths.

2.

I grow, From specs of my core To the new Around me this apparent homeland

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3.

Do you see yourself in me? Do I see myself in you?

I am still plagued with understanding and reconciling the two, Between this interior homeland, and current homeland that loves and respects my dreams.

4.

Once meeting you, I saw myself in you; Our renewal through love and companionship and truths of our common world.

5.

Don’t forget this blessing.

From waters of justice This ordinary abundance They wish for My people of the motherland Here and there I returned to belonging and gratitude.

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Music and my place in the Cloud

T

‘post-grunge’, and ‘deconstructed club’ don’t intricate operas beguile and enchant. Despite alarm me — fluidity defines my globalised having never set foot in East Asia, Puccini generation. However, music has always found sets his oeuvres Madama Butterfly (1904) mysterious ways of permeating borders, from and Turandot (1926) in Japan and China sea-faring music boxes containing fragments respectively. Or more fittingly, the operas take of exotic sounds to Soundcloud links place in ‘Far East’ imaginaries complete with proliferated online. stereotypical characterisations, anachronisms, and flagrant inaccuracies.

A cultural hotbed, 17th century Italy gave birth to Opera, a versatile theatrical mode In Madama Butterfly, the eponymous of music. A similar hotbed giving rise to Butterfly is a 15-year-old geisha seduced by genre fluidity was the Internet, invented a U.S. naval officer, Pinkerton, stationed in in 1983 — the ‘cloud’, that transcendental Nagasaki. After impregnating the naïve girl, space of amalgamated artistic expression he abandons her to find a ‘proper’ American in bytes. The mechanisms of YouTube, wife. Lovelorn Butterfly commits suicide Whether out of habit or the fear of being alone SoundCloud, and Twitter allowed amorphous upon learning that Pinkerton returns only and ever-malleable genres including the now to take his son to the States to be raised by with my thoughts, I abuse music streaming ubiquitous hip-hop to grow both its audience his wife. Beyond the libretto (narrative), services, racking up 2000 minutes a week and its musical and aesthetic influences. on Spotify. Microgenres like ‘glitchcore’, cultural fusion and juxtaposition occur in Puccini’s remixes of the Star-Spangled A growing ‘postcolonial’ Banner and Kimi ga yo, the Japanese national sentiment teases out the subtle anthem. Japanese folk tunes composed in the threads of cross-cultural distinctively ‘Oriental’ pentatonic five-note connections in early Western scale underscore ostensibly music. Opera’s multicultural traditional ceremonies, influences are evident in complementing its very beginnings in 1607 the colourful with Claudio Monteverdi’s kimonos L’Orfeo. However, later opera donned is anything but subtle in its by cultural inspiration, copiously lending itself to exoticism and Orientalism. A repeat offender is Giacomo Puccini, a quintessentially Italian composer with a voracious appetite for foreign sounds and stories. His unique, melodically

he world has become a cultural melting pot. Exchange, fusion, and appropriation are unrestrained in our borderless era of instantaneous communication. My home was similarly a melting pot; my ears perpetually drowning in aria (song), or isai (Carnatic music) for as long as I have lived. My father’s Opera discs monopolised the CD player. In my grandmother’s house, the pious television blared Hindu chants without a moment’s respite. A classical Indian vocalist, my mother was forever singing to the drone of a Tambura.

Words Kuyili Karthik 54

reworked a classical Indian song for their characters. Despite deceptive mimicry breakout 2013 hit, Ginseng Strip 2002. The of Japanese instrumental timbres and song’s virality years later on TikTok attests typically Eastern melodies and harmonies, to the originality of Yung Lean’s curious the Japan sonically constructed in Butterfly mélange of American hip-hop, internet is a fetishised vision reflected in Puccini’s eyes. Though Puccini is lauded for pursuing culture, 2000s nostalgia, and depressive suburban ennui cultivated in Södermalm, authenticity, a recent discovery reveals a Chinese music box contributed significantly Stockholm. Despite his puzzling origins to Butterfly, accounting for similarities with and memedom, Yung Lean has markedly Turandot, set in Peking. Even the music box influenced mainstream hip-hop.

With ethereal beats and narcotic autotuned lacks authenticity; its Swiss manufacturers flows, the Sadboys carved out an enduring transcribed Chinese melodies in Western niche in hip-hop’s unbounded expanse. Their notation, stripping them of many original eclectic tastes are self-evident: traces of stylistic features. Puccini had limited avenues to encounter Japanese and Chinese Lil B, Chief Keef, Future, Friendzone, and Houston’s chopped and screwed beats cluster music, even desperately asking a Japanese their discography of cloud-rap. Hackneyed ambassador’s wife to sing him folk songs.

Marketed solely in China, these well-travelled hip-hop phrases and African-American music boxes were a rarity, steeped in mystical slang pervade Yung Lean’s goofy lyrics, echoed from Mexico to Australia. While his and exotic auras of the ‘Orient’. unlikely come-up was met with incredulity, his influence speaks for itself. Lean’s early Many interesting parallels emerge between fans included Travis Scott, a then relatively Puccini and rapper Yung Lean (Jonatan underground Houston rapper whose style Leandoer), belonging to the Swedish bears the Sadboys’ trademarks. In Scott and collective ‘Sadboys’. Akin to Puccini’s Lean’s 2014 collaboration ‘Ghosttown’, the cosmopolitanism, the nebulous ‘cloud’ rappers proudly represent their hometowns may well be the hometown of Lean and in a demonstration of the cultural circularity the Sadboys, part of the first generation to grow up on the internet. Like Puccini, Lean generated by globalisation. The Yung Lean doesn’t shy away from borrowing elements of of today is artistically hypermobile, crooning other cultures. Take his 2013 single ‘Kyoto’, melancholic indie ballads under the alias with its pentatonic flute melody, or his early jonatan leandoer96 and forming a punk-rock iconography of Japanese writing and Arizona band Död Mark with Yung Gud, a fellow Sadboy. green tea. Embracing hip-hop’s practice of sampling, the Sadboys even

2023 marks the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, celebrated in the White House courtesy of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, who pronounced hip-hop “the ultimate American art form”. In spite of hip-hop’s inalienable Black American origins and character, for so many to enjoy and partake in the culture is perhaps music’s purpose and power. To hear oneself everywhere, to be fragmented and scattered all over the place, brings a strange comfort. Music and identity entwine themselves symbiotically. As a migrant, I unconsciously seek belonging in every microcosmic experience: I listen to Jeff Buckley and hear instead a potential Carnatic virtuoso. In a time where generative AI is capable of ‘creativity’ (making fake Drake covers of any song imaginable), I fear that originality might never again be conjured. My only solace is that the other, more productive use of AI will algorithmically pave a Yellow Brick Road of YouTube suggestions for me, littered with musical gems.

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The Sun Worshippers There is no greater act of worship And make from them castles, cities, Commonwealths, Than tasting ice cream on your lips, And Centrelink offices, Kebab shops and crackhouses, The Sun as our only witness to judge And I claw at the sand, trying to unearth the Sun Us and this altar we call a bench, Buried underneath this numb necropolis named Sydney, Your hand gripping mine like a prayer But all I found was your breathing body waiting, As we listen to the universe crash And I wipe off the ice cream from your lips, Upon the beach, that eternal song And you ask me, as if to God’s ear, Known only to our people and our “Do you know the name of the Sun?” Old language: mumbling, muttering And I take your shoulders and I shake your face From one dusty syllable to another, And I wait and wait for an answer, Words unspoken, words unconquered, But all I find is breath, nothing but breath.

Dictated from our dementia deathbeds, Words waking bodies without memory, Let the universe know, Words waking bodies that weep, That the Sun has risen to judge us, Words waking bodies that Fire is devouring fire in beautiful worship, Worship the Sun. And every saint and sinner is out on the street, Like cockroaches greeting farewell to each other: Our bodies are dancing Say goodbye to the bus stops that once knew people, Like wipers on a windshield.

Say goodbye to the motorways and their motionless memories, There will always be enough distance Say goodbye to the pokies and the pubs and their poverty, For you and your strange idols Say goodbye to the postcodes and the parking lots, Between my chest and yours.

Say goodbye to the servoes and the bottle-oes, There will always be enough distance Say goodbye to the aged care homes and their prisoners, For you and your strange God Say goodbye to the suburbs and their hellish sprawl, Between my lips and yours.

Say goodbye to the Hiluxes and the Utes, those heartbroken families, There will always be enough distance Say goodbye to the telephone poles and their little crucifixions, For your motherland and mine Say goodbye to the nation’s 20 million balding heads, Between my postcode and yours.

Say goodbye to the Hi-Vis-coloured dreams of our generation, Our backs are no longer surfaces Say goodbye to the skyscrapers chewed by fire like wax candles, For our ancestors to sleep on, Say goodbye to the shopping malls, those ugly concrete colossi, But our spines now swell like rice terraces.

Say goodbye to the cities, buildings bleached white like lifeless coral, Our faces are no longer grasped by hands Say goodbye to the local parks, and their graffitied toilet stalls, But by a thousand closed wings, Say goodbye to the benches where boys go to die in human sacrifice, Flightless in their suffering.

Say goodbye to the beach which follows you wherever you are, Our tears baptise the earth like Say goodbye to this sunburnt country, Falling bombs, leaving little caverns Say goodbye to our bodies, which crumble like icebergs to the sea.

Beneath our feet.

We worship the Sun not because it gives us light, But here I am, But because it has given us a shadow.

A prisoner of this beach.

Let the universe know, The ocean has swallowed the Sun, That even in the perishing of the final star, And memories, like tall ships crossing There is no greater act of worship The water, get shipwrecked on the shore, Than sharing your breath And I must gather all the fragments, all the debris, With all the living.

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WordsJoseph John Kagsawa

Selling Sex

Kate Saap sat down with ex-independent sex worker Lola Sinclair to do some market research.

Kate: What drew you to sex work?

Lola: The short-term cause for me was financial struggles. I had quit my hospitality job because I was depressed and struggling to work my shifts. I needed good money quickly to pay rent, food, and live. I kept joking with friends that it would be so much easier if I could just find a sugar daddy. And when I realised I wasn’t actually joking, I did a quick Google search and found a number of sites that served as my gateway into independent sex work.

As I reflect on my experience as a sex worker, I begin to uncover some of the deeper, long-term factors drawing me to sex work. I was sexually repressed as a child and consequently being a late bloomer — with my first ever sexual experience at 21 years old (I entered into sex work a year later). Deep insecurities stemming from failed situationships and feeling undesirable also had an impact, as my decision to be a sex worker felt like a powerful “fuck you” to past lovers who broke me down and used me. It was also an attempt to reclaim my own narrative from those who made me feel like I wasn’t worth anything serious, that I was the type of girl who was only good for a casual root. Ironically, a lot of my clients commented that they were drawn to me because I seemed like someone who didn’t belong in sex work.

K: Are there advantages of being an independent sex worker? Compared to working at a specific sex-on-premesis space?

L: It’s easier. Cuts out the middleman. All the pay came to me and I decided my own shifts, my own rates, my own conditions and place of work, and my own clients and times. It felt more convenient and covert to work this way.

Sex work isn’t exactly a career that’s highly regarded in general society. Coming from a deeply restrictive ethnic and religious family, it wasn’t something I wanted many people to know about. Working in a brothel appears a lot more real and confronting, it seeps into regular life. Independent sex work felt like it reduced the risk of people finding out and it was also a way for me to detach from it or frame it how I wanted to.

K: How do you think sex work is perceived within the general population?

L: I think it’s definitely [negatively] stigmatised. Sex in general holds this weird place in society where it’s simultaneously revered and maligned. It seems to both fascinate and offend people; that conflict is exacerbated when sex manifests in more precarious forms, like sex work. I think people are drawn to it and interested in the topic at least, like our ears perk up at the mention of sex — but especially sex work because it’s this scandalous taboo,hot topic that we feel shouldn’t be discussed or acknowledged in open public settings.

There’s a kind of sinful attraction, or corrupt temptation, involved with sex work where it affords sex this special power in the collective mainstream consciousness — which is unusual considering it’s such a fundamental aspect of life. I don’t think sex work is discussed enough in a general mainstream public context, and not often in serious academic discourse either. When the topic is brought up, it usually carries an element of discomfort and sometimes even disdain; otherwise, there’s a sense of profound significance attributed to sex like it’s somehow different, more special and separate to other natural experiences like eating food or sleeping. There’s obviously some sort of issue where sex, despite being one of the most natural experiences of life, is stained with a warped view that it’s somehow shameful, immoral, tainted, forbidden and dirty.

K: Why do you think this is the case?

L: The image of sex in our society has been historically imbued with perversion. I think it probably has something to do with the level of vulnerability involved in sex, and the kind of intimacy and human connection it promises; with sex work especially, those things seem to be paramount and exist on this blurred plane where you’re providing a professional service but the kind of service you’re providing necessitates a relationship where its difficult to maintain detachment from your client. Sex is generally a deeply personal and intimate experience, and at some point we decided that vulnerability and intimacy should be admonished and rejected. This has created a glaring problem where people can’t reconcile their own sexual desires with their negatively skewed perception towards sex and sex work.

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K: In an ideal world, how would you like people to perceive sex and sex work?

L: There are a lot of myths surrounding sex work. Some people romanticise it and think it’s more glamorous or cool than it actually is, others have a stereotypical image of sex workers in their minds that skews towards the negative.

These people assume that doing sex work has a significant bearing on who you are as a person and that it’s probably an indication of other character traits, usually character flaws. This creates a culture that is largely negative, as these stereotypes about what a sex worker looks and acts like contributes to harmful narratives that don’t often reflect reality, certainly not mine anyway. It’s interesting that the same treatment isn’t afforded to other service industries,showing how the subject of sex is treated differently within society.

Ideally, the patriarchy is overthrown and we no longer view vulnerability and intimacy as something to be condemned or avoided or something that’s taboo. I think strong human emotion in its most powerful form is rarely given a space to manifest: sex offers one of the few opportunities where that sort of release of emotion is allowed. A lot of that probably has to do with sex being so personal, which tends to be frowned upon in open public markets due to the nature of our society and the dominance of outdated patriarchal ideals.

What if I wanted to be a

T

he most formative moments in life happen when you’re 12 years old and past your bedtime. Knowing that your lockless door could swing open at any moment, and you’d have to execute that phone-under-pillow manoeuvre is a rush yet to be outmatched. For some it was the only quiet time they got in the day, for others it was the only time their internet friends were awake. For me, it was the freeing refuge of Tumblr.

From 2011 to 2014, I ran a semi-popular blog with a moderate audience gained entirely from making Photoshop GIFs for fandom obsessives. Gradually, I distanced myself from hunting down bootleg rips of One Direction: This Is Us for a gifset and moved towards a more universal (read: more engagement) genre of blogging: shitposting.

One specific night, deep into past-bedtime territory and dreading the early start of the following morning, I sent out a single shitpost into the dark blue void. “i hate how you're just born out of nowhere and you're forced to go to school and get education so you can get a job what if i wanted to be a duck” I turned off my phone and went to sleep.

By the morning, it had 15,000 notes.

duck?

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Words Long Huỳnh

Before even getting out of bed, I scoured the activity tab to investigate what happened during the night. Turns out the post shot into the stratosphere after a mutual with a significantly larger following reblogged it – and it showed no signs of slowing down.

The notes count had doubled by second period at school. I pulled out my phone from under the desk to show my activity tab blowing up to a classmate, both of us bewildered by how such a mundane sentiment was going so viral. Throughout that day I kept checking as the number climbed, 40k… then 50k… I felt alive. 60k… then 70k… then 100k...

Of course, such thrills were unsustainable. What started as a thrilling hourly hit of dopamine quickly turned into a bothersome cacophony of notifications. It crossed 200k… then 300k… then 400k, then 500k.. then I didn’t care anymore.

Every once in a while I’ll get a glimpse of how it’s doing, like when my friend sends a screenshot of infamous Twitter meme thief @Dory reposting it verbatim. The internet meme machine is a slaughterhouse. Once a thought is sent into the ether, it will be shared in DMs, quote tweeted, screenshotted, fried, deep fried, thawed, pulled apart, and stitched together until the point of complete disfiguration. I knew I had lost it when Facebook mums started posting it alongside photos of minions and sold stickers of it on RedBubble. I felt like Jennifer Lawrence in that scene in mother!. They killed my baby and all I could do was stand by and watch.

The internet meme machine was also a factory of which I was a determined worker. As a dweeby 12 year old with a not-outstanding IRL, strangers on the Internet thinking I was funny felt exhilarating. This one taste of notoriety led to a dedication to churn out as many shitposts as I could; suddenly each thought was no longer mine to have but a potential smash on Tumblr. Many post-bedtime late nights were spent watching, studying, and understanding the Tumblr zeitgeist.

What did everyone think? What were they reblogging? What was flopping? I became an ardent purveyor and creator on the dashboard, breaking pieces of my still developing brain in exchange for online currency.

By 2014, I had accumulated hundreds of thousand-note-posts, carefully combing through each and tagging them #1k to indicate the milestone. It became a joke among friends, online and off, that I was Tumblr famous. Of course, I never reached microcelebrity status, but it felt just as fun to pretend.

On October 17 2014, I deleted my blog on impulse. Gone were the years of effort I had dedicated, the online friends I made, and the permalink to the original duck post. In the years since, I have tried to archive as many posts as I could by finding reblogs through Google but it was mostly a fruitless endeavour.

Despite referring to it as ‘the duck post with a million notes’ in conversation, it has only reached 950,000 notes to date. With the rapid decline of Tumblr post-porn ban, it plateaued right before the finish line and people had latched onto reposts on other platforms instead. Could Tumblr’s mini resurgence in a postElon Twitter world push it across this final frontier? After all, I think the sentiment still holds evergreen because no one ever gave me an answer: what if I wanted to be a duck?

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Models:

Natalija Antic Nimrit Kaur

Stylist + Designer: Kadie Dao

Photographer: Reese Claro

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Noumenia

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The time of the New Moon

Clothing Kadie Dao

The 'Noumenia' capsule collection draws inspiration from the captivating beauty and transformative energy of the phases of the moon.

This collection seeks to encapsulate the metamorphose of the new moon, translating its celestial grace into two transformative looks.

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Noumenia aims to celebrate the beauty of the moon's transformative journey and its profound connection to the cycles of life. The collection is a tribute to the celestial marvel that is the moon, offering an elegant and captivating sartorial experience that transcends time and space.

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Trend trackingWords

Nina Wang

“Fashion is not only a representative function of social life and structures but also a poetological activity, a cause rather than effect, that constructs and subverts its expression and thematize itself with a performative power that is capable of inducing change in individuals and social life”

T

The Fashion Condition: Rethinking Fashion from Its Everyday Practices, Clemens Thornquist he lifetime of a fashion trend can often be analogised to the life history of a religious figure.

The humble and sexy low-rise $3000 Miu Miu micro-miniskirt and Jesus Christ, for example — birthed to minor aversion and fanfare, fanatically gaining the general public’s interest, and then suddenly and cruelly exiled from public favour, with its dogged supporters now derided, dishevelled, and behind the times.

Miu Miu Spring Summer 2022

Just as we can examine how society’s obsession with certain individuals indicates ever-changing and ever-dying social and political values, so can our study of a seemingly trivial and meaningless trend.

Microtrends, like incels, were formed in part because people wanted to feel the warm embrace of a community where the entry level requirements were bar-none — just buy this one top, or miniskirt, or scarf, and you’re a fashion-forward It Girl fawned over by all. But then, too many undesirables start latching onto this new top and entering this fashionforward community, and you need to move on to another microtrend Booooo.

Our need to find a unique identity is exponentiated by our visibility in the global community of social media, and the growing awareness that there are millions of individuals that look and behave just like you. So what can you do (besides cultivating a genuine and rapidly dying sense of community by partaking in activities, hobbies and forums that require actual work, courage and learning)? Wear something that sets yourself apart from the crowd (but not too much…).

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Two trends we are tracking are the coquette and Harajuku styles. However, by the time of publication, some, if not all, may have been banished to clothing deserts already — left to disintegrate into microplastics for forty years and forty nights.

Jesus Spring Summer 33AD

Coquette has now solidified itself as an embrace of femininity​​– where ribbons, bows, milkmaid puff sleeves and sheer lace adorn a “reclaimed” female form. The saccharine aesthetics previously condemned in childhood due to societal disdain for the feminine are now embraced with a newfound autonomy, particularly in the form of reclaiming girlhood and innocence of an era bygone.

THE

Unfortunately, as an adult, dressing to emulate the daintiness and sweetness of your childhood self will not preserve you from sexualisation, especially when the ancestors of coquette formed their aesthetics around doing exactly that.

A

History

SHOPPING LIST Sandy Liang Selkie SHUSHU/TONG Mirror Palais Cecilie Bahnsen Simone Rocha

The true roots of this trend can be found in the Victorian Era (18001850), where popular silhouettes included extremely puffed or legof-mutton sleeves and shoulders, low necked collars with excessive lace trim layers, and full, heavily embellished skirts. Although these details would be discarded in favour of more practical, functional workwear as women started to werk and enter workforces, the modern renaissance of these feminine and dainty styles can be tracked to Tumblr circa 2012-2014 (much like many trends we know and love).

Lana Del Rey’s 2014 album Ultraviolence brought a vulnerable yet seductive sound that inspired a community of online, dismal teenagers to emulate the girls that Del Rey wrote her songs about. More problematically, these girls included a romanticised version of Dolores Haze from Lolita, evidenced in a multitude of Off to the Races x Lolita film edits and moodboards.

However, members of these style communities were (and still are) likely to have ties to Daddy Dom x Little Girl (DDLG) BDSM communities and pro-eating-disordered (or, pro-ana) groups — an exploration of topics which were probably not beneficial to the psychological development of impressionable teenage girls. It became clear that the nymphette and ‘Babygirl’ style communities coveted a frail, innocent, virginal body, often under the dominance of a man- falling back in line with the traditional, reductive views of women from the very era they took their puff sleeves from.

SHUSHU/TONG

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REQUIRED READING, WATCHING AND LISTENING: My Year of Rest and Relaxation (auth. Ottessa Moshfegh) The Virgin Suicides (dir. Sofia Coppola) Black Swan (dir. Darren Aronofsky) Marie Antoinette (dir. Sofia Coppola) Lana Del Rey discography BE ON THE LOOK OUT FOR… Bow motifs Lace camisoles Pearl necklaces Floral print Silk/satin

Simone Rocha NYFW 2023

Sandy Liang Spring Summer 2024

Coquette Autumn Winter 2023

Core

Coquette prophets surfaced and an understanding of their works quickly became indicators of a well-read coquette individual. Some entry level requirements are listed below:

FUTURE

Trajectory

Coquette may just be the most enduring trend encountered in the 2020s and its sons — lovingly named balletcore, lovecore and cottagecore amongst others — have graduated into widespread mainstream consumption. Sandy Liang’s celebration of bows and femininity in fashion have just started to reach mainstream acclaim, and the girl-coded and addictive pleasures of consuming, shopping, and dressing up are eagerly reaffirmed by the coquette community — leading to a tiresome cycle of finding the cutest coquette thing, it bleeding into yucky mainstream hands and losing its charming exclusivity, and moving on to the next cutest coquette thing again.

But all things, aside from polyester, have to come to an end. Maybe supporters will soon grow sick of the frills and pink thrust upon them and jump ship into edgier, more androgynous styles just as their child selves did. Or maybe this style will last for as long as we associate frills and pink with femininity — and so the competition of who has the most ribbons and the most lace and thus the most woman-ness, will continue.

THE SUBCULTURES Changes in Japanese mainstream fashion have been fed by the emergence of Japanese youth subcultures, where communities formed on the basis of shared interests and pastimes, and subsequently developed certain ways of dressing to signal their membership of these communities to others.

As subculture styles bleed into mainstream fashion however, their clothing no longer signifies anything meaningful about its owner, and thus these subcultures seem to fragment and die out until their nostalgic resurrection around 20 years later.

Notable Japanese subcultures include:

Finally, our subject...

Harajuku style

* A collection of subcultures including aforementioned ones * Clothes often thrifted and handmade * An effort to rebel against societal norms through unique, bright and unconventional clothes.

Gyaru

* Partying and clubbing, rebelling against Japanese beauty standards of pale skin and dark hair * Blonde hair, tanned skin * Makeup that exaggerated eyes and lips

Lolita

* Inspired by Victorian and Roccoco styles of dressing * Modest full knee-length skirts, petticoats, blouses, stockings and bows * An escape from adulthood by wearing clothing inspired by their childhoods (similar to aesthetics and motives for coquette but unlikely Japan, or that these communities recently coined White regularly interacted) Wakanda, has been a place of fascination for foreigners ever since it was forced to open trade with the rest of the world. From Van Gogh to Katy Perry, artists have taken inspiration from or completely reused Japanese art styles, clothing and practices for their own projects. Inevitably, the world takes a keen and insatiable interest in the unique styles of dressing organised by fashion-forward youth in Japan, and white people continually terrorise Japan’s secondhand market to upsell Japanese vintage on Grailed.

Harajuku 68

STREET STYLE Shoichi Aochi released the first issue of Tokyo-based FRUiTS magazine in 1997, where he would shoot full-page portraits of cool Harajuku individuals in cool clothes. The outfits were so unexpected and mesmerising that they rebranded the thoughtto-be reserved, homogenous Japanese youth into creative, innovative, individuals.

The shots filled up 233 issues until the publication’s end in 2017, where Aochi eulogised —- “there are no more cool kids to photograph”. Yeowch.

FUTURE TRAJECTORY

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Marc Jacobs Heaven has faced criticism for a figurehead of Japanese and even Asian replicating and capitalising on the creativity fashion. The revival of FRUiTs magazine of Japanese youth that scoured and developed has also played a part in devouring the culture it thrived on — it created a lookbook their own sense of style on often limited for Heaven and participated in an NFT budgets. A white man’s exploitation of the innovative styles of often poor and working- collaboration. It seems that Aochi will happily reinvent ‘cool kids’ as long as they class youth is tiresome and expected.

Heaven’s success also reveals how solidified, have enough money for him. restricted and slaughtered Harajuku style is Our perception of Harajuku style will be now — an American brand has effortlessly so mutilated by brands such as Heaven that commodified and boxed up a subculture’s they will become meaningless, shallow fashion style, and has cemented itself as American styles — paralleling the Western bastardisations of sushi, kimonos and Pokemon. But rebellious and nonconformist POC youth are more resilient than most; their styles will evolve and develop into places of extreme innovation, meaningfulness and ridiculousness. These are hopefully places where Marc Jacobs cannot follow.

FRUiTS Magazine 1997-2017 Shoichi Aoki THE CORE The effort to recreate the perfect Y2K style in 2019-2023 left no 2000s photograph untouched. Instagram archive account owners fought tooth and nail to be the first to upload scans of 2000s teen mags and Paris Hilton paparazzi shots — and FRUiTs magazine was no different. The Instagram account: FRUiTS Magazine Archive was founded in 2019, and attracted a flurry of teens that used the unique, bizarre, indescribable style of Harajuku youth as their fitspo and moodboards, so that they could imitate uniqueness all by themselves. Brands like the notable Marc Jacobs Heaven, “a polysexual line aimed at a younger audience while blurring gender boundaries”, sell colourful, kitschy clothes for up to $600 AUD. Similarly, fast fashion subsidiaries like Jaded London and DollsKill seemed to capitalise on this trend, and even replicated pieces from the subjects shown. It appears that audiences were chasing the unconventionality of the people in FRUiTS magazine, but were not ready to discover these unconventionalities themselves.

The cool kids were indeed dead — no one was brave enough to become them ever again.

REQUIRED READING, WATCHING AND LISTENING: SHOPPING LIST

FRUiTs Magazine NANA (auth. Ai Yazawa) City Pop

Vivienne Westwood BE ON THE LOOK OUT FOR… Hysteric Glamour Colourful kids clothes Vintage Japanese clothing (Angel Blue, Daisy Lovers) Oversized, unfitting silhouettes (emulates the Bape homegrown, thrifted look) Undercover Earmuffs Sanrio branded items Legwarmers Rei Kawakubo Comme Des Skulls Garcons Star patterns Anna Sui Marc Jacobs Heaven

Joseph John Kagsawa @joe.lello3

Claudia Blane @claudblane03

Lukas Kalos @lukaskalos Charlie Kennedy @ch4zzyst4r

Max Chahine @m4x.jpeg

Long Huynh @lo.ng

Amelia Franklin @lame1iamei Soleil Mistry @octopi_darling

Harry Gay @harry.gay_

China Meldrum @china.thecountry

Nina Wang @nniawng

Alexa Hansen Weeks @alexahansenweeks Draw a stick figure of yourself in a free box to become part of PULP!

Contributors Lina Alsabiri @linauurrr

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Ashray Kumar @_ashrayyy

Kuyili Karthik @kuyilikarthik Zoe Hercus @zoligst

Sofia Manilla @sofiamanilla. png

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The editors

Kate Saap @m1ss_kate

Sonal Kamble @cbbgo3 Huw Bradshaw @childsouljaboy Lizzy Kwok @lizzy__430

Justine Hu @justiinehu

Simon Harris @wikipedia_voyeur

Lameah Nayeem @30nay.la

pulp12 is love dm or email us: @pulp.usu pulp@usu.edu.au 72

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