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.
Senior Editor
Kate Saap
Editors
Huw Bradshaw
Simon Harris
Justine Hu
Sonal Kamble
Lizzy Kwok
Lameah Nayeem
Design
Simon Harris
Justine Hu
The views in this publication are not necessarily the views of the 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. Issue 14, 2024
Presidential Foreword
Hi friends,
I hope you’ve all had a wonderful start to the semester!
We’ve had a lot happen in the last few months, our huge Welcome Fest line up of events and programs spanning three days, regular programming at Manning and major parities including the sold out HeapsGay Mardi Gras After Party, and now the Festival of Creativity.
The Board has been working hard to ensure our internal mechanisms and policies remain fit for purpose. We have been working to amend our key policies and Regulations to ensure we are held to account through appropriate processes. It is exciting times of growth for our organisation, and it is heartening to see the significant number of students engaged and active on campus.
We will have the Annual Board elections in the coming months, I hope to see you all around supporting the enthusiastic candidates who care so deeply about this organisation.
Otherwise, if you ever need anything please do not hesitate to reach out to me at president@usu.edu.au! Wishing you a very happy rest of your semester.
With love, Naz
Senior Editor’s Note
I Love My Neuralink™
Sold all my thoughts For internet clout. Where did humanity go?
Somewhere from the darkness of cyberspace it called to me. Quietly at first, growing louder until I could no longer ignore the cries: BURGER KING FOOT LETTUCE.
If you grab my skull and shake it around, dogecoins fly out of my ears. It’s impossible to fall asleep. The glow of the Victory Royale screen is burnt into my retinas. Everything is POG, I’m surrounded by PAWGs; there is no escape from this suffering.
The grass I touch has turned into 64-bit square blocks.
Sold all my thoughts For internet clout. I am Candy Crush-ing it.
Anyway.
Love always, Kate <3
This issue we asked contributors to look into the future, and somehow, they returned with a whole lot of monsters. Muses and mutations, machines as eyes and bodies. We glimpsed into spaces we didn’t occupy yet and found them very ugly. And scary. Somewhere in the future, after dreams of AI domestication, we may fall in love with machines, fuck them, and carry their little 8-bit spawn. Or I will. I don’t know.
For something we experience every second of every day, change sure is something we’re very scared of. It’s hard to find a PULP editorial that doesn’t mention it in one way or another. It’s the nature of prefacing a capsule of time. I’m in March, you’re in April. You’re seeing these words in a way I haven’t yet. In that stretch of time, so much has birthed and died. And here we are, talking.
Somewhere in this issue you will reminisce over a home now crowded into a screen, a liberated childhood and liberated memes, obsession and perfection and the impact of synth-lords. Some spreads are fraught with fungus gnats and others with rizzler-bots. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this issue, pieces and pitches and all. Thank you for allowing us to hold your work in these pages.
It’s our team’s penultimate issue, so our time to chat dwindles. PULP will soon move through new incarnations, just as you will, and somewhere between the fear and horror something beautiful will bloom.
In the meantime, keep reading.
Enjoy Issue 14
Pulp Issue 14
The Quiz
?
1: Which Greek island shares a name with an inner west Sydney Suburb?
2: What was the final film John Cazale starred in?
3: What architectural style is The Strand Arcade built in?
4: De Stijl, also known as Neoplasticism, is an art movement originating from which country?
5: In Irish rebel song ‘Come Out, Ye Black and Tans’, which three locations are mentioned?
6: A 2014 ‘Bubbling’ Scandal saw the termination of an NRL player from which club?
7: The 38th parallel north was used to structure which major geopolitical event?
8: In The Godfather’s famous baptism scene, who plays the baby being baptised?
9: In February 2024, an American private spacecraft landed on the moon sideways. What was it’s name?
10: Television series Miami Vice popularised which unlikely combination in men’s fashion?
11: Yiddish word tsuris refers to what?
12: Excluding Australia and New Zealand, name one other national flag that depicts the Southern Cross.
13: Which vegetable is unique to an ‘Aussie burger’?
14: Which video game series takes it’s name from the scientific term for “the time required for half of the atoms of a radioactive substance to become disintegrated”?
15: Jacques Pépin worked as a personal chef for which French president?
16: In Crime and Punishment, what is the given name of protagonist Raskolnikov?
17: Most know John, Paul, George and Ringo to refer to The Beatles, but what quartet might David, Stephen, Graham and Neil refer to?
18: Which Roman historian lived the earliest: Livy, Tacitus, or Suetonius?
19: What online activity is described by The Financial Times as “posting ostentatiously inane and contextless content”?
20: Oyster Bay wine is from which country?
Thank you
Aubrey
Bella
Bipasha
Izzy
Josh
Minah
Owen
Soleil
Justine
Paul
Photo
Photo
Photo
Photo
Connor Chen
Connor Chen
Connor Chen
The 2010s were pierced with an intergalactic soundwave that approached planet Earth. A crescendo of broken harmonies echoed down, with a glistening angelic figure following behind. Her name was SOPHIE. Pop music collectively muted that day, and the reinvention of sound was mechanically engineered through SOPHIE’s fingertips — just in time to save the music industry.
SOPHIE is a revolutionary musician and producer who has become an admirable icon in the music industry for her eccentric, innovative style of production. Her journey as an artist began in the late 2000s with the band Motherland, performing live around the UK and Berlin. In the 2010s, SOPHIE quickly made a name for herself in the European club scene through her experimentation with DJing. She first gained international attention through her dance-pop and techno tracks ‘Bipp’ and ‘Lemonade’, which she often remixed in clubs around the UK. The production of SOPHIE’s unofficially released project ‘PRODUCT’ was admired for its originality, embodied in its use of abnormal yet realistic sound effects — bubble wrap popping, slurping, water droplets, buzzing beetles, and stretching rubber. This debut album was a wall of thermoplastic rubber that divided SOPHIE’s music from mainstream pop, inviting listeners to peer in and question the ultimate criterion of pop music.
SOPHIE’s sophomore album OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES is her
most authentic and personal project with its exploration of identity in the public eye. Unlike ‘PRODUCT’, this album is more stylistically consistent, but continues to experiment with distorted vocals and electronic production in the slower-paced and stripped-back tracks. SOPHIE has transmogrified her sound through this project — reshaping her previous electronic-techno club persona into a conceptual reinvention of who ‘SOPHIE’ really is — an ethereal mosaic of heavenly synths, broken pounding bass beats, and experimentation with vocal modification. This album became revolutionary for its expression of queer identity through its lyricism and eccentric aural production. In the song 'It's OKay to Cry', SOPHIE writes "And I knocked on your front door, that was you I'd never seen before", acknowledging the importance of exploration and finding comfort in one's own identity as a transgender woman. The duplexity of identity is also implemented through the hard deep bass, choppy laser noises, and eerie drilling sounds in the song ‘Faceshopping’, which is sonically opposed to ‘It’s Okay to Cry’, featuring a celestial piano progression and SOPHIE’s raw vocals. Though these songs are dissimilar, SOPHIE’s lyricism and opposing production elements evokes how the expression of queer identity can be powerful, yet ignominious.
The artistic motivations behind SOPHIE’s projects are what encapsulates an audience's attention. SOPHIE’s
SOP
SOPHIE’s Reinvention of Hyper-pop
A crescendo of broken harmonies echoed down, with a glistening angelic figure following behind.
Joshua Hicks
SOP
experimentation with electronic-pop production has contributed to the formulation of the genre ‘hyper-pop’. Hyper-pop is a relatively new term and is often used to categorise artists who sonically incorporate electronic, experimental production elements into their music. This genre is an evolution of smaller sub-genre pop music categories, including glitchcore, lo-fi trap, bubblegum-pop, hyper-funk, chiptune, and dubstep. These genres collectively experiment with glitchy voice modifications, hard scratchy trap-beats, popping glittery xylophones, and soft transporting synths — sounds that are abnormal to mainstream pop. SOPHIE’s music specifically introduced the use of sound-play to hyper-pop, including both her use of sampling and embodying moving-objects through the mimicking of bubbles popping, stretched elastic, running water, beaming lasers, and screeching car tyres. Artistically driven through its value on creative expression, hyperpop as a genre is uniquely distinct from mainstream commercial radio hits.
A.G. Cook's record label ‘PC Music’ is one of the driving forces of the hyperpop genre. Many experimental artists, including SOPHIE are under this label. A.G. Cook and SOPHIE built a new wave of pop which intrigued alternativepop artists that were interested in the art of sonic discovery. SOPHIE’s
Photo credit: Glamcult Magazine
reinvention of pop music invited notable artists to collaborate with her, welcoming her to twist and contort their songs through warped underlying beats and electric backing vocals. This was evident through her collaborations with both mainstream pop and alternative artists, including Nicki Minaj, Madonna, Cashmere Cat, Vince Staples and Flume. The aerial perspective on SOPHIE’s hyper-pop production style has become a major influence to many artists and their willingness to view music through her artistic vision.
SOPHIE has mainly produced various songs for Charli XCX, producing her 2016 project, ‘Vroom Vroom EP’ and several songs from her two later albums ‘Number 1 Angel’ and ‘Pop 2’. SOPHIE interpolated her production into Charli’s hit songs, including ‘Vroom Vroom’, and ‘After the Afterparty (feat. Lil Yatchy)’. The power of SOPHIE’s production is evident in ‘Vroom Vroom’, a song which atmospherically transports listeners from a quiet bedroom to a car on an open highway accelerating at 180km/h, skimming across cracked asphalt and inhaling the fumes of burning tyres. Charli XCX has evolved artistically and sonically as a musician through her experimentation with hyper-pop production, emerging from her earlier experience in the pop-rock scene. SOPHIE’s influence on alternative pop artists is evident
through the innovation and reinvention of musicians, as well as the projects they have released recently, such as Charli XCX’s 2020 album ‘how i'm feeling now’ — one of her most sonically progressive albums. This album incorporates a range of distorted, auto-tuned vocals that are paired with electronic synths and underlying broken trap-beats. A song that stands out on the tracklist is ‘pink diamond’, which features mechanical, androidly crashing noises that are coherent with the lyricism of being a video-chatting party-girl. The engineered qualities of this track can be compared to SOPHIE’s song ‘HARD’, which similarly plays with a rubbery elastic synth soundboard that is cohesive with a hard bass and glimmery xylophonic sounds.
Artist and producer of ‘how i'm feeling now’ A.G. Cook has also become inspired by SOPHIE'S electronic and divergent style of production. Cook has produced music for many upcoming hyper-pop and alternative artists, including Caroline Polachek and Tommy Cash. Though Cook has his own artistic motivations, he continues to be inspired by SOPHIE’s musical legacy, which can be seen through his recent release ‘Britpop’. This track has a progressive electric synth chord progression and samples the word ‘Britpop’, underlying it as a rhythmic beat.
Caroline Polachek is another artist that has veered her own musical engineered techniques through the eyes of SOPHIE. Polachek’s track ‘Dang’ incorporates a muffled vocal repetition in its chorus with a hard bass beat throughout the track — a distinctive influence of SOPHIE’s music. It also utilises distorted vocals and sounds that imitate a wobbling metal sheet. Caroline Polachek has previously recognised SOPHIE as an influence to her artistry, dedicating ‘I Believe’ to her after her passing in 2021.
SOPHIE has cleared a path for upcoming hyper-pop artists through her adaptation of electronic and pop music. Her production style has challenged the expectations of mainstream pop, which admirably influenced artists to follow in her footsteps. The creative motivations SOPHIE had as an artist will forever leave a beauty mark on the industry. The sound of SOPHIE will forever contribute to the evolution of music and creativity that comes with hyper-pop experimentation. Music in the 21st century will continue to evolve on SOPHIE’s behalf, and the cultural reset she had on pop music will be remembered through every revolutionary cycle in the music industry.
Meme culture has been corrupted, monetised as another means of commercial persuasion.
Internet memes have become a new commercial language, one that taps into a generational reservoir of serial references. This piece follows the evolution of that language, visualising a future where 2020s internet culture is chic, and memes have transcended metairony as a serious aesthetic.
In 2054 the 2020s re-emerge in a photoshoot. In a performance that recalls insta shitposting and deep, late-night r/TIHI dives, a brand is sold. Every aspect of the shoot makes a deliberate invocation. The face covered in cream, the resolution of the photos, the state of the shirt. All to sell a product.
But this material use debases the freedom that defines meme culture, monetising a space defined by anonymised community-generation, unlicensed redistribution, and freedom of access. A space already being appropriated in our modern day.
Isaiah Gee and Inez Gee
Isaiah Gee and Inez Gee
Isaiah Gee and Inez Gee
I’ve lived away from home for the past two years, so I watch it from afar. I watch through the lens of Marcel Heijnen and Erica of Sheung Wan Cats, Hong Kong’s resident shop cat photographers. Through social enterprise-turned-corporatised Humans of New York imitators. Through breaking news notifications, documenting the deterioration of political freedoms in the city, on top of hours doomscrolling retrospective Twitter pages, longing for the days before Hong Kong’s skyline was reimagined to a pastiche of “global financial hub”.
But my experiences observing the movements and developments of the city is always a mediated form of reality, whether it be through text, AI, or constructed dialogue in movies. Somebody or something is present, telling me what to do and what to think.
Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kinoapparatom, 1929) begins with a man climbing out of the head of a movie camera. The camera then assumes the role of both spectator and participant — hovering amidst a city in constant motion, it witnesses birth, death, work, marriage, divorce, and the process of filmmaking itself. The empty streets of an unnamed Soviet city slowly awaken. People start to work and swim and sweep.
Man With a Movie Camera defies almost all conventions of the movie: there is no story, no character, no dialogue, no set. Throughout the film, we watch it being put together. Scenes of Vertov’s brother and cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman percolate the screen: he climbs on moving cars, trains, motorcycles, and stands amidst bustling traffic and factory lines to capture the energy and machinery of the city. We also see Vertov’s wife Elizaveta Svilova working tirelessly to construct the film we are watching. In the editing room, she
selects, cuts, and splices with surgical precision. Behind the camera — we see the eyes of Vertov — the cameraman himself. The often invisible human labour behind filmmaking unfolds.
This 68-minute film demands a type of understanding that is visceral and immediate, one which is grounded in the present, rather than being mediated by text or the theatrical pursuits of the actor. It’s still referred to as a documentary, but what city is being portrayed here anyway? Kiev? Moscow? Odessa and Kharkiv all at once? I’m inclined to believe Vertov was not concerned with the reflection of a world outside of Man With a Movie Camera, and yet the camera captures something from this world the human eye will never see.
Born in Bialystok, Poland, in 1896, David Kaufman adopted the pseudonym Dziga Vertov in his early career, which roughly translates to “spinning top” in Ukranian — a name evoking images of the cameraman’s winding of the film camera crank. Like many other artists of his generation, Vertov was heavily influenced by Italian futurists of the early 1900s, who proclaimed the end of decadent art and literature. Futurists embraced innovations in technology and were transfixed by the dynamism of modern urban life. They called for a decisive break from the old, though at the cost of destruction — war and the dismantling of all cultural signifiers of the past — museums, libraries, academia and the such.
Russian futurists yearned for a new Soviet culture, aiming to displace the Pushkins and Tolstoys that had defined imperial Russian culture for the past century. “For us, the most important of the Arts is cinema”, Lenin said in the 1920s, a decade of immense cultural and artistic experimentation. As part of the broader Kino-eye movement, Vertov sought to create a new language of cinema through the abolition
of convention. Characteristics of filmmaking associated with bourgeois European culture and the rising cultural hegemony of Hollywood were dispensed with: intertitles, plot, actors, studios, replaced by the ordinary peoples and streets of 1920s Soviet Russia. Along with other kinoks, Vertov pioneered an ideology of cinema that rejected the “fiction film”, offering a critique of how narratives are constructed.
He wanted the material in his films to be found and not staged. In fact, Vertov found “old films, based on the romance, theatrical films and the like, to be leprous.”
— Keep away from them!
— Keep your eyes off them!
— They’re mortally dangerous!
— Contagious!
He denied the present state of cinema to guarantee its future. In typical modernist fashion, Vertov deconstructs the innate conventions underpinning cinema, dispenses with them, and is still able to create meaning in the process. Writing in 1923:
“I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it. Now and forever, I free myself from human immobility, I am in constant motion... Now I, a camera, fling myself along their resultant, manoeuvring in the chaos of movement, recording movement, starting with movements composed of the most complex combinations... My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world. I decipher in a new way a world unknown to you.”
Our eyes can only see so much, and they see cities very poorly. Even with technology and the kino-organisation (editing) of others, all I see are Sydney Trains and corporate universities and ‘Romanticising Parramatta’ Instagram reels. But I still search for John Razalo’s
Instagram and watch Chungking Express on days I feel homesick because I don’t live in my city anymore. I just dream of it and desire to experience it all — its textures, abstractions, sights, and sounds, what is happening now or at a point of time in the past that is not to be forgotten.
In Wim Wender’s 2023 film Perfect Days, the camera, again, captures something I will never see. Centred on the life of Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho), a charming elderly man with a love for 70s rock and Japanese folk music, the camera follows his everyday life as he cleans Tokyo toilets, visits the sento (public bath), and reads Faulkner before bed. Hirayama doesn’t say much, nor is there any traditional “plot” to the film. But the camera observes the beautiful and often lonely mundanity of urban life, calling to mind Wender’s earlier work Wings of Desire (1987) where the camera floats and flutters across the city of Berlin, spectating mortal life through the lens of two angels. Hirayama, to me, is like the angels in Wings of Desire. He leads a relatively solitary life separate from the other inhabitants he encounters in Tokyo, studying the city with angellike attention. On every lunch break, he takes a photo of the same tree and bows to the shrine atop it. He collects boxes and boxes of photos, each labelled by month and year, taking note of the tree’s changing shadows, branches, and leaves — a meticulous observation enhanced by the eye of his Olympus camera.
Vertov’s theory of the Kino-eye reimagined the possibilities of the human eye through a unique kind of synthesis with technology. Man With a Movie Camera is a testament to the ways in
which film is able to construct a new social reality through the lens of the camera, penetrating more deeply into the visual beauties of the city in which we are often blind to. Tryus Miller, Professor of Art History and English at UC Irvine, wrote that the Kino-eye “is not separate from, but an extension of the human way of seeing.” It is more akin to an enhancement of the human eye, a cyborgian construction of the future, if you will. In Svilova’s experiments with temporal manipulation throughout the film, editing loses regard for time or formal continuity. Slowing and reversing time, Svilova disrupts the linear progression, inviting the human eye to appreciate the potential of the Kino-eye in concert with the art of editing and aesthetic choice.
The global influence of the Kinoeye movement has been discussed extensively, but perhaps its most interesting legacy lies in the participatory Man With a Movie Camera: Global Remake. In 2007, artist Perry Bard crowdsourced scenes shot by people from around the world employing Vertov’s Kino-eye approach to filmmaking. The film was broken down shot-by-shot, so that people could reinterpret and deconstruct his work in their own light. Like the works of Wim Wenders, the Global Remake embraces the camera as an organiser of reality, making something out of the energies of city life. Rather than being a mere imitation of the film, however, it looks to the past to destabilise the present, and encourages us to question how we can view and construct reality.
The human eye is limited after all, and what we cannot see, the camera can.
Vertov’s storyboards.
Lizzy Kwok
Jason Ocampo
Jason Ocampo
a love letter in
The soil of my indoor house plant was no longer static, it had begun to move. The grains of dirt were crawling over one another. It was a never-ending game of tetris, displacement, and replacement skilfully imitating a pile of soil. I raised my hand to it for a closer inspection. The crawling masses rose, not eloquently or particularly high but rather just centimetres above the earth, briefly becoming clouds to this muchmore-alive-than-I-thought landscape.
Fungus gnats.
The soil had grown wet and moist and the fungus gnats had moved in. They delighted in the white spots of fungal mould that festered in the badly lit and irreparably humid depths of my basement house. I looked at my pothos and all I could see were the crawling masses.
Fungus gnats live for around 24 days from egg to death, breeding from day 17 and producing up to 200 eggs. Unlike other species, the sex of the offspring is not determined by the fertilised egg and sperm, but rather is pre-determined by the female alone, with a single eggproducing fungus gnat producing only one sex of offspring. They remind me of my mother’s mother and my mother’s mothers offspring. I am born of a family coincidentally bent on ‘paternal genome elimination’. A family of femininity. Daughters birthing daughters birthing ‘daughters’. Judith Butler writes “gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original.” I was seemingly
destined for femininity; born into it and surrounded by it. I am a reproduction of a reproduction. Yet my mimicry never quite achieved replication; there was a corruption in the transference, a glitch.
Queer theorist Jack Halberstam explains the tomboy to be associated with “a ‘natural’ desire for the greater freedoms enjoyed by boys” until it begins to push at the edges of adolescence, where gender must be remodelled for an appropriately gendered world. I relished in my self-proclaimed tomboy status. I felt revered by girls and boys alike. The boys respected me and the girls relied upon me; a mediator between these precursory binaries. I had a sense of my corporeal capacity to straddle both and all. To exist alongside and in opposition to all genders; take what I please and revel in the opportunity outside of these binaries.
The ego of a tomboyish five-yearold seemed to crack
new pink standard for politeness and restraint. My difference was becoming irreconcilable, and people began to notice. I wasn’t aware that these changes in my peers would forebode my obliged renouncement of masculinity. If I had been, maybe I would’ve mourned more, yearned more, fought more. Eventually I would grow up. On my 11th birthday I picked out a hot pink surfboard — perhaps the dykiest display of femininity one could muster — and my stint of masculinity had come to an end.
Yet, my refusal to give into my want to appear as the other didn’t last very long. Like many queers, the departure from adolescence marked my tentative return.
Where the gnats proliferated along sex binaries at birth, my gender seemed to be proliferating at maturity. As a child I played Mum’s and Dad’s and as an adult I play boyfriend/ girlfriend. Playing
as my inversion became increasingly perverse. The other girls had mastered palatability and I was confused when things had changed. Reliance became rejection and respect became repulsion. They had taken up roles I didn’t know we had auditioned for. My masculinity had continued past preschool and into primary school and begun pushing at the edges of my adolescence. My once fawned over confidence was a threat to the
dress up and dress down with lovers in a game of inverted make-believe. 70s Women’s Liberation movements relished in the belief of lesbianism as entirely different from heterosexual sexuality. The butch had become a symbol of male mimicry, described by Moraga as a “slavish copy of heterosexual roles.” ‘Slavish’ as in servile and ‘slavish’ as
in unoriginal. Victoria Brownworth declared in 1975 that lesbians are no longer “into role-play,” the butch had been cast aside as the lesbian community ascended to a ‘moral’ sexual horizon free from the pitfalls of patriarchal heterosexuality. Embrace of the moral separatism of lesbian love positions itself not in opposition or subservience to patriarchy but as entirely free from it.
I, on the other hand, feel entirely bound up by gender. Halberstam explains the gender of the butch lesbian, particularly the stone butch, to become visible through the repetitious performance of a gender that is “necessarily imperfect, flawed, and rough.” My lesbianism is in the yearning and the failures to play as boy. The attempts and the refusal to be viewed as girl. I was presupposed as girl before birth, we are a family of women, and yet my masculinity has always felt innate. Ordained as dyke, I play as both now. At times a corporeal compulsion and at others an exercise in theatre, I love playing dyke in this slavish gender playpen.
camouflage of my fungus gnats amongst the soil had served them well. They had reproduced and bred without my noticing. Only in their masses had they become recognisable, and now they were not to be ignored. They have overwhelmed my house as they have overwhelmed my mind. I have decided to leave the fungus gnats alone. Perhaps out of evolved thinking but moreso out of conceded defeat. Instead, I water less now, move plants outside, give them some sun (less fungus, less gnats). Outside the gnats feast amongst their fellow muck-loving friends; isopods and soldier flies and worms and slugs. Each of them eating and shitting and becoming that which they love most — decay. Existences in perpetuity — death to life to death — reproduction, reproduction, reproduction. Digging into the soil all is revealed, an ecology of degeneration and regeneration. I wonder about the gender of the fungus, the compost, the decay that they munch upon. How does the sexing of these miniscule creators manifest in the lives spawned out of their non-human
gendering?
I am a feaster as the fungus gnat is a feaster. We are beings of consumption. I am an imitator and a reproducer — everything that I have constructed is a delicately created recreation of all that is around. I flirt with gender and enjoy its spoils as much as I am constrained by it. I relish in the decay of traditions and binaries. I indulge it and I resist it. I taunt and I tease. I submit and I dominate. I give up to it and into it. I love it. We, the fungus gnats and I, live amongst the decay. They fuck in the soil and I fuck in the sacristy between how I feel and how I am. I play as boy and I play as girl but I’ll never be anything other than dyke.
Halberstamn posits the butch as locked in a discordant embrace of hypervisibility and illegibility: “not male, not female, masculine but not female, female but not feminine … indefinable (and) unspeakable.” The
soil-loving solidarity
Hannah Lawrence
Epitaph
She loved a fucked-up shoe.
This is captioned underneath a photo of Carolyn BessetteKennedy on Instagram. She loved a square toed, snakeskin shoe.
The former wife of John F. Kennedy Junior, Carolyn tragically died alongside her husband and sister in an airplane crash in 1999. Recently, Carolyn has undergone a cultural veneration as the New York Times has dubbed her a “Ghost Influencer.” This is mainly due to her legacy as a style icon who epitomises 90s minimalism.
Carolyn’s approach to fashion revolved around elegance, sophistication, and simplicity. She showcased a new, unpretentious way for the upper class to define themselves and their wealth. Status from minimalism has continued into the contemporary climate, seen through growing interest in ‘clean girl’ and ‘quiet luxury’ aesthetics. Rather unsurprisingly, Carolyn has become a poster-child for the latter.
Simultaneously, Carolyn rejected the uptight preppiness typically associated with WASP aesthetics. WASP comes with its own aesthetic and pop cultural legacy: if you’re
I Cannot Enter Incu Anymore Because When I Check the Price Tag On Something I Have to Awkwardly Smile at The Shop Assistant and Walk Out, So Idolizing the Extremely Rich, Good-Looking Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy Is Kinda Counter-Intuitive
unfamiliar, think Ralph Lauren, boat shoes, tennis, and especially the Kennedys.
The Kennedys represent a certain ethos of the United States: rich, good looking, and highly educated with a lineage traceable to Patrick Kennedy; an Irish immigrant who worked in Boston as a barrel maker before serving on the Massachusetts state legislature from 1884-95. This cliché rags to riches story is characteristic of a distinctly American dream.
It then follows that JFK Jr would marry a woman who was in life and looks an archetypical all-American girl. Described by high-school classmates as the “Ultimate Beautiful Girl,” Vanity Fair reports that she was a muse for designers at Ralph Lauren. With buttery blonde locks, Carolyn was an aspiring model before becoming a sales assistant at Calvin Klein. Seemingly uncomfortable with her newfound fame after marrying America’s sweetheart, dozens of paparazzi pictures show her rowing (oval sunglasses on) in the Hamptons, or walking a dog on the streets of New York in a tweed red Prada coat and black beanie. In these pictures there is always a connotation of American excellence; whether through her husband, or the surrounding American scenery.
Simultaneously, Carolyn’s wardrobe — defined by simplicity — allowed her to assume a variety of roles. She was at once a WASP, the wife of a public figure, the girl next door, a Calvin Klein shop assistant turned publicist. The latter is most important, as Carolyn appeals primarily to American working women. These are outfits and clothes made to live in: Carolyn is the paragon of 90s minimalism, and more broadly represents what I call ‘functionality as fashion.’
90s minimalism represented a radical shift from the opulent 80s and was defined by neutral tones, clean lines, and quality tailoring. Women’s attire now focused on practicality as it became clear that women’s employment rates were continually increasing.
As a result, Calvin Klein, Helmut Lang, Miuccia Prada and Tom Ford started designing clothes you could walk, work, and party in. Whether it’s tweed heeled Mary Janes paired with a corduroy grey sweater from Miu Miu’s FW97 (designed by Miuccia Prada) or Kate Moss in a pinstripe pant suit for Gucci FW96 (designed by Tom Ford) 90s minimalism teetered precariously between sensuality and elegance. Practicality as a defining conceptual model in fashion allowed clothing to meet at the nexus between style and comfort.
Yet, it was her wedding dress — a bias cut, cowl neck silk gown designed by then unknown designer and personal friend of Carolyn, Narciso Rodriguez — that is most emblematic of 90s sensibilities. Dennis Reggie, the couple’s wedding photographer, later told Vanity Fair that the dress was “indicative of the way the wedding was — natural and of the moment, not trying to be any more than it was in its simplicity.” The wedding dress cemented Carolyn’s legacy as a style icon.
It is this simplicity that draws me and so many others to Carolyn’s style. Or more pressingly… how can it be emulated?
As Sunita Kumar Nair notes, Carolyn’s legacy comes from her ‘it factor.’ It is an intriguing notion to outside spectators: rolling out of bed and within ten minutes, becoming the most elegant woman in the room. And yet, if not obvious, this type of refined, ‘effortless’ coolness is heavily cultivated.
Carolyn exists in the accolades as an it girl. Only two videos exist of her speaking. This elusiveness adds to her charm: a mysterious, elegant socialite that was truly candid, truly humble. And yet, it is clear that Carolyn’s style was by no means effortless. This is the central paradox of Carolyn’s style and 90s minimalism more broadly — appearing un-put together in a put together way requires a lot of, well ... putting together.
You’ve seen immortality before, remember? It surrounds you in the form of a woman. You’ve seen her face as acrylic or oil on canvas, in bronze that rusts or stone that chips. You tested her gaze and were surprised when she caught yours, eyes moving as you passed. She was a monument, remember? An attraction and marvel; unique and easily bottled into the lens of a camera to be shared and repurposed. She existed only as words in a book and you remembered her by the phrases curated by another’s imagination. She had a name that rhymed and a life easily summarised into lyrics and chords. You’ve forgotten the name of the song. You focus for a moment and she’s there, on your screen, a billboard, a cover.
She’s a muse that perhaps consented to the portrait but not the immortality, and she’s not alone.
Countless women have been eternalised and remembered as muses rather than themselves throughout European history— for appearing rather than acting. Beauty, competition, vanity, innocence, judgement, possession, and submission are immortalised into a spectacle for so-called femininity to be surveyed. This has bred an assumption and an inheritance of performance. In
Ways of Seeing, John Berger notes how “from the earliest childhood”, women are “taught and persuaded to survey [themselves] continually”; to watch themselves being watched and respond accordingly. It doesn’t take a man on the street or behind an easel to prompt us to perform. It’s an instinct fed to women for the purpose of survival.
To escape this constant objectification and change the way sight is projected onto them, women have made muses of themselves. Female artists, writers, activists, and innovators have left behind a fragmentation – an assortment of self-portraits, retellings, autobiographies, performances, and footprints slammed onto paths they weren’t allowed to tread. Paths that still exist today for us to pass through.
According to Lauren Elkin, to reframe their immortality, the muse had to become a monster. Monstrosity represents all a society repulses and ejects. As the borders of normality are built, all that is deemed ‘monstrous’ is cut off and forced to dwell at this boundary. Monstrosity is therefore defined by “difference and excess.” To be in and represent a female body in the early twenty-first century is to explore the beautiful and discarded,
The monster, the muse
and tell one’s story through new forms. In her book, Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art, Elkin writes that “to become the artists’’ and “paint [themselves] into the picture”, women have to “remake the picture entirely, [find] a new language, cut it all to pieces, instigate processes of entropy, de-create to create.”
Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) decreates through her photographically documented performance, Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints). In a series of thirty-six slides, she presses a sheet of glass against her face and naked body. Her bodily features, up close and deformed by the sheet, demand attention. She alienates us through her body’s indecipherability, asserting discomfort in a reimagining of the ‘grotesque.’ She flattens and obliterates her body, disrupting how others perceive and draw conclusions about her race, gender, age, and class. The movement and transition of her face is disturbed by the violence of the viewer’s gaze. Through this, Mendieta arms herself with the aesthetic lens of abjection as a “politicised strategy”, according to Leticia Alvarado, unsettling her audiences. Deformity, here, is her weapon, as she comments on the societal biases she endured as a Cuban-American female artist. Through a series of thirteen vignettes, rather than one portrait, she not only protests gendered violence, but also the process of racialisation in the United States. Through this performance, she hybridises her identity, grounding her representation of self in intersectionality. In her introductory essay from the catalogue of her 1980 exhibition, Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States, Mendieta writes that “as nonwhite women our struggles are two-fold. This exhibition points not necessarily to the injustice or incapacity of a society that has not been willing to include us,
but more towards a personal will to continue being ‘other.’”
Cindy Sherman also reimagines the selfportrait by becoming both the subject and artist. She harnesses her body as a canvas for costume and make-up, transforming herself into figures and styles stretching the Baroque period with characters like Bacchus, the Roman wine god, to the 21st century Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. She exposes stereotypes through artifice, particularly focusing on gender and class identity. Through saturation and exposure, Sherman presents perception as something mediated by images that cannot necessarily be trusted. Photographs are a product of the person behind the lens, and therefore can easily manipulate and mislead.
While women are told to take up less space and draw less attention, they are simultaneously objectified into the role of the eternal subject, hung on a wall or a pedestal for others to gawk at. However, this doesn’t mean women never gazed back or tried to reinvent what it means to see. Voice was and still is used by women to make themselves material and assert themselves into a space that preferred apologies or silence. American installation artist Ann Hamilton demonstrated this tendency by asking her class of mostly young women to carry around a 4 x 8 sheet of plywood with them for a week so they could “get used to taking up more space”. On public transport, they found themselves crammed between strangers’ bodies and a material that belonged to walls. It followed them home and to class. They had to live with the scale of the space they took up at every moment. While many found themselves apologising in these moments, after a while, they also resented the need for politeness. These reactions allowed Hamilton to illustrate how art is social and a lived process that enters every aspect of one’s life. The art
of installation is about creating spaces and environments that respond to a system. One must walk into the piece to prove its existence. Similarly, a woman must speak to ensure her existence isn’t ignored.
Elkin speaks to this idea of women transgressing against the restrictions of space through the concept of a “flâneuse”. A feminisation of the French word, ‘flâneur’, which originally described a man who wanders aimlessly, she subverts the expected role of a woman in a cityscape. By becoming the dawdler, observer, and surveyor, the flâneuse rejects the role of the passive muse, the objectified, and the voyeur’s victim. Suddenly, space becomes something a woman can claim and remake.
In our contemporary context, women’s immortalisation of themselves has expanded into countless new artistic and interdisciplinary forms. Photography, mixed-media, collage, projections, performance, movement, and sound have been incorporated to represent women as a multiplicity of identities, in a constant state of flux and movement, and in ‘unconventional’ or supposedly ‘unappealing’ forms and bodies. However, it’s important to note that
immortalised identities and muses can not and should not be static. If one is to live forever, through art or other means, then they must also be allowed to change. Art needs to encapsulate shifts, breaks, moments of growth or deterioration, and the moments in between. Elkin writes that “nothing, not even art, can be mummified and preserved forever and that we wouldn’t want it to be.”
Immortality isn’t the final goal. It’s filling spaces with a presence, memory, history, and story that is real and changing that matters. Rather than apologise for the space we take up, we must revel in it. It’s important to pass down truths and experiences for people to relate to. Perhaps they will discard it, find it irrelevant, misunderstand it, or ignore it as they pass by on the street. Perhaps they will be inspired. Either way, we need to give them the chance — the agency — to decide.
This photo series was shot on a short trip to Pondicherry ( pபுதுச்சேரி), a former French colonial settlement in India. While British dominance is well-documented, French presence in India is often overlooked or lesser known.
In the time that I was there, it became evident to me that beaches here serve as hubs of daily activity, offering local residents a space for relaxation, camaraderie, and a place of solace to countless couples through late afternoons. Residents of Pondicherry embodied a laid-back, leisurely attitude unlike in other parts of India where life is often fast-paced, hectic, and teeming with relentless energy. Pondicherry possessed a preserved Eurocentric sense of relaxation that one can only imagine; harkens back to its colonial roots when the town served as a haven for French settlers seeking respite.
Ashray Kumar
girlwith a ...
You are standing at the foot of turn 16. The track is covered in the same microplastics, rubber, and soot that coat your body black. Grime engulfs all, the barriers that weave and form each corner are covered in a thick layer of dust; excess char made from burnt tyres, scorched by concrete friction and the stifling summer heat.
The apparatus is solid and sturdy, and you are part of it despite your softness. Blackness creates the illusion of decay, but everything here is as new and delicate as glass. This plastic breaks like bones, it degrades like you. Everything here traverses a line between permanence and fragility.
This techno-paradise is your boss’ fever dream. To your left, at a distance, throngs of people are enveloped in smoke, imperceptible through fog. Their silhouettes become an illusion of being and unbeing, a trick of the hazy neon. Their movements take the celerity of an old cartoon, a series of lines and shapes, as graceful as the lights that swivel and turn to reveal people in the darkness where before there were none.
Nothing is real here, except the series of screens before you, and the deep rot that pulsates, as steady as your heartbeat, from the centre of the floor and outwards to your feet.
Your attention is beckoned back to the course by the vector of the lights. All is subject to the choices, the inclusions and exclusions of the unmerciful yellow. The pathways drawn by shadows capture you until you are transfixed. You are seduced by the motions that entice you, as if by the slow gesture of a curling finger. It is the event of the hour, and it is time to perform.
This is life in submission to the machine.
The screen closest to you is the manual control of the karts on track. It is your job to oversee the speed system, to speed and slow drivers according to their skill level. With just a soft press of the screen, you can watch the karts quicken or slow to your liking.
Where first the race begins moderate, soon the karts accelerate and move faster than your fingers can handle. The higher the speeds are, the more dangerous it gets, yet all are under the illusion that they are safe. Here, the machine is worshipped and praised like an all-knowing, all-protecting God.
The machine is an illusion that plays with your humanness, bestows power onto you in the trick mirror you face. You control the machine, and yet it controls you. You are responsible for its successes, but its downfalls are far, far worse, and you are responsible for these, too. You click and click and something deceives you, processes outside of your control, behind your back. Everything hangs heavy on an imperceptible, indefinite article. Everything in sight is dependent on something that cannot be seen or quantified, or even blamed at all.
The security cameras are innocuously placed, yet you are aware of every single one. There are cameras that survey each turn, there are cameras that watch each kart. There are cameras that are positioned to, ever so carefully, watch you, too. Diagonally, above your right shoulder, there is a camera that protrudes from the ceiling. It steals your permission, it lodges itself into the crook of your neck.
The camera is the mass at the back of your head. You cannot dispel it no matter how hard you try. Your humanness is so heavy in your lungs and they want to watch how well you hold it there, how well you can suffocate its movements, stifle its breathing. You are a camera of sorts, too.
From opposite ends of the track, you survey the space and staff. You watch how well they can react, how well they can occupy the space between suspense and horror.
The staff are watching you, too. At 15 minutes on the clock — and this part is integral — you call the next race in and press play on the safety briefing video. It lasts for 3 minutes. This gives you time to disinfect, scrub, and place the used helmets back on their rack, assorted by size. The helmets are made from hard plastic, curvaceous and smooth., and build up on the rack after each race.
Your eyes have become accustomed to the dark., Your movements have become mechanical. You cannot afford to stop or pause, even for a brief moment.
In your hands are a soiled rag and spray bottle. You cannot recall when you picked them up or from where and, try as you might, the walk from the video room to the helmet rack is irrevocable. When you see your hands you cannot recognise your forearms as yours. Your fingers are new and foreign. The veins in your hand that rise and fall with each movement are your cross, you can feel the heat flooding to your extremities, radiating from your palms. You have become a puppeteer of yourself. Your consciousness has been robbed from you, and so you cease to exist.
The track is humid and hot. Heat melts through the ceiling and radiates through the floor. It surrounds you, it dulls and numbs your senses. The track is the vessel by which you are deprived until you are just a body, operating without complexity or care. Outside, the world is dark and quiet. It is just beyond your reach. Your body seems to have become part of the technology, taken by the metal and glass. You are machinery made of flesh, built of wires and bone.
If you are going to create a go-kart track, you must first consider go-kart mechanics. You must draft safety protocols that are to be followed in crashes like this one, where the driver has suffered such intense whiplash that the barrier has broken. The driver has hit the barrier around turn 8 with such force that he has jolted forward, neck askew, and his seatbelt has pushed him backwards into his seat.
The wreckage is a distortion, a ripple in time. With the click of a button, everything becomes slow. The lights change to a flashing orange warning and the karts are reduced, instantly, to slow motion. The tinny beat of a pop song plays over the speakers, it prevails over all. The only perceptible movement is the trio of staff that meet at the crash in lightning speed, exchanging wordless looks as they push the kart from the barrier.
There is no one watching, but now your job is a public performance that needs to be executed with the precision of a knife. You push down the feelings in your chest. From the barrel of a camera, you see yourself crouch, exchange words with the driver who wishes to keep racing and, with another click, everything returns to how it once was. The staff return to their positions and, like magic, the blip in time is erased and the wreckage ceases to have ever existed.
From a space you cannot locate, the pop song continues. It continues, and continues. It radiates from the ceiling, it is emitted from the walls. It threatens your personhood for reasons you cannot fathom or explain. A traumatic accident is not allowed to be a tragedy here.
You cannot dispel the song from your mind, it plays and plays on repeat, long after the crash has been fixed. You exist in the space between anticipation and fear, in worship to the music. It is your job to stand at the foot of the track, survey the space. It is your job to wait, and wait until it is, once again, your turn to react and erase.
“Did you know that this theatre is haunted?”
The intention to see is too often bound by the idea of the cinema — a theatre of light in which image is projected perfectly, the spectacle of sound and movement as hypnotic as the repetition of arranged seating, all viewers facing the lightwell. This environment certainly provides a utopian ability for film, one that has succeeded throughout the existence of moving image, but as the distribution and conceptual sightlines of film evolve and become disfigured, the presentation of it must adapt. This progression has produced theatrically altered extensions of a utopian viewing, vessels such as museum-grade projections for immersive video in galleries, specific video sculptures popularly made since the 1960s, experiential phenomena such as watching film on an aeroplane, and even common objects like neon signs. Where the theatre does not exist, these examples provide a separation that expands the frame of the moving image to similar states of spectacle, refreshing the beam of light of the projection.
As the experience of airports is inherently weighted in an excess of human emotion — that of farewell, new beginnings, love, loss, etc — it is possible that the only natural response may be to sit back and watch. In-flight entertainment, the luxury of velocity matches the awakening of cinema / cinema for a utopia, ascension and television...the way turbulence builds a barrier to enhance film.
@fontanesi on instagram
Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, The Paradise Institute, 2001
Bruce Nauman, Live Taped Video Corridor, 1970
Harun Farocki, Workers Leaving the Factory in 11 Decades’, 2006
Shigeko Kubota, Duchampiana: Nude Descending a Staircase, 1976
Duchampiana: Marcel Duchamp’s Grave, 1972-75
The objects of video sculptures create their own perfect theatrical vessel in which their image is framed. Beyond a timed experience, the viewer is no longer seated and can move freely with the object, allowing themselves and the work to become necessarily grounded. The frame is fixed, akin to that of a lamp. The luminescence of a lightwell that is cornering a bedside table or looming on street posts, bordering the ceilings of office cubicles and illuminating passageways. Objects that distort cinematic viewing, television viewing and audience participation — towards utopia.
A theatre of screens...can I get up out of my seat now!
Zhang Peili, Uncertain Pleasure (I), 1996
In the mystical worlds of science fiction, the past may be our only tool for understanding the future.
Since the dawn of the internet and the rise of modern computing, humanity has been running a race. With whom? That slippery bitch, the future. There’s a certain desperation in how we hurtle forward towards the next thing, the newest fad, the freshest take. As our connectivity grows and the gears turn quicker, so too do our worlds spin that tiny bit faster.
Ursula Le Guin, in the opening lines of her sci-fi space adventure ‘City of Illusions’, asks us to “Imagine darkness”. It’s true that when I think of the future, it’s hard not to see the dark. Global warming, a second Trump term, income inequality… so much can go wrong, and so much is uncertain.
The future isn’t terrifying because we know it will be bad. It’s terrifying because we don’t know.
And yet, despite her overwhelming presence, I find we do not waver. Instead, as I have been noticing more and more, people are turning to science fiction, the only genre dedicated to knowing what cannot be known. People don’t flock to cinemas for Dune Part 2 just for Timothee’s cheekbones (I hope). There is comfort, I think, in finding out what’s going to happen next for humanity.
Sci-fi writers can be split into two camps: those who celebrate the progress technology grants us, and those who warn against it. But if there’s one thing the dystopias of the 50s and the space operas of the 70s have in common, it’s this: they’ve cracked the code of the unknowable future by using stories to reflect our pasts back at us.
In my sci-fi explorations, I found myself drawn to the writings of Ursula Le Guin, and her short story collection, ‘Worlds of Exile and Illusion’. The three stories, ‘Rocannon’s World’, ‘Planet of Exile’ and ‘City of Illusions’, tell the tales of a
human race spread out amongst the stars. Beyond her fantastical world-building and character development, Le Guin’s work stands out because of how she positions her stories around the future.
When we look at Le Guin’s future, we don’t see it through the eyes of space pilots or emperors. We see it through the eyes of the medieval societies of worlds conquered by humans. In her stories, the iconography of the future is constructed using the language of the past. Rocket ships, aliens, and even the vastness of space are recontextualised as wingsteeds, the farborn, and the long night. This technique simultaneously brings these worlds closer to us and blurs them beyond all comprehension. To read Le Guin’s work is to become a detective, to shift through a dialogue that fails to describe what it cannot truly capture, to realise the truth at its core.
When asked in 1985 about sci-fi and the future, Le Guin regarded the future as something to look back on: “When we look at what we can’t see,” she says, “what we do see is the stuff inside our heads.”
When you look a little closer at the sci-fi standouts of the past century, a similar pattern begins to emerge. In constructing their worlds, language becomes a key component of how sci-fi writers wrap their futuristic sensibilities around the wisdom of the past.
Frank Herbert, author of ‘Dune’, was keenly aware of the importance of words in developing a future that feels real. “If you want to give the reader the solid impression that his is not here and now,” he says, “give him the language of that place… that oral tool - it has it’s own inertial forces; it’s mind-shaping as well as used by mind”. ‘Dune’ is a smorgasbord of language, including French, Latin, Hebrew and Navajo. However, Arabic figures as the most prevalent language of Dune, Manvir
Singh of the New Yorker highlights at least 80 terms (used primarily by the MENA inspired Fremen of Arrakis) with distinctly Arab origins.
Scholars like Harris Durrani, a Professor of History at the University of Cambridge, have argued that this use goes beyond the tokenistic to a profound and extended conversation with MENA, and especially Islamic, culture. In his book, Herbert draws from and modifies the roots of Arabic words to explore how a language changes over time. In a similar way, when he engages with distinctly spiritual terms, such as identifying Paul as Muad’Dib, he draws from Islamic spiritual knowledge, asserting the character as something more than a messiah. Speaking of the book’s reference to passages from the Qur’an, Durrani says, “Herbert is not merely copying-and-pasting from Muslim sources but actively engaging with how they might be reinterpreted… while preserving their basic principles across millennia’. Here what Herbert demonstrates is the value of deep introspection on the past in order to grant his world a sophisticated spiritual grounding.
Moving forward in time, the 2014 film ‘Interstellar’ —a movie famous for its use of theoretical physics to inform and illustrate its futuristic visuals — also uses language as a key medium for connecting the future and past. In the film, a Dylan Thomas poem written in the 50s is used to serenade a crew of astronauts embarking on a mission to another galaxy. The poem, written as a plea to the poet’s father to fight against death, is recontextualised to capture the emotional crux of the film, humanity’s resolve to forever “rage, rage against the dying of the light”. The poem, which should feel out of place in a film that leans heavily on scientific jargon, seems to transcend time as it captures the heat and futile hope of the moment.
In Sci-fi, the future is just as much about looking back as it is looking forward.
‘Worlds of Exile and Illusion’ begins and ends the same way: with tragedy, born in the cruelty of time. In the prologue to ‘Rocannon’s World’ and the ending of ‘City of Illusions’, medieval queens and exiled negotiators embark on journeys into the stars, to recover treasured heirlooms and rescue doomed planets. They speed out on mystical vessels far beyond their comprehension, flying faster than light to planets unknown. They stay for a few weeks, a few months, and return to their homes to find their lovers dead and their children older than they are. The relativity of time has ripped away the connections the characters have to their pasts, and in a way, destroyed their futures. In Le Guin’s stories, there is tragedy in hurtling towards the future and leaving the past behind.
We all too often fall into the trap of seeing the future as a never-ending race towards an ever-receding goal. The past behind us is worthless, the future ahead a glimmering jewel. In her works, Ursula Le Guin allows us to see the future from a different angle, allowing us to see what can’t be seen. To see where we will go, we must look at where we have come from.
I write this now to present to you my account of a most hornswoggling tale. It may not, in contrast to much of the text you plausibly engage with, be a story of celestial proportionality — to the contrary, it concerns something so particular, so localised, that it includes but one principal character. John Johnson is a man unremarkable in all respects besides his head. By this, I do not mean to suggest his possession of any noteworthy cognitive abilities, nor sexual. Rather, John Johnson possesses a head of such scale, hairlessness, and shine that many passersby believe it to indeed be luminous. Upon first meeting, many presume he puts this cranial quasi-luminosity to good use, perhaps by working in a mine or routinely camping (since, the aforementioned many reason, in each case a head-torch would cease to be necessary). Alas, I do digress, for this story concerns itself not with the aesthetic defects of John Johnson, but an unmistakable tragedy that befell him on a relatively unremarkable Thursday morning.
The sun rises, as it is wont to do at the start of each day. John Johnson sits erect in his bed, and is moreover upright. Indulging his like of habit, he stands and performs a brief, mostly superfluous stretching routine before opening his bedroom door and calling his dog in for a morning snuggle.
Rupert, he calls.
Rupert, he calls again.
There is no verbal response, as is regular for Rupert — a corollary of his doghood. However, John had come to anticipate non-verbal cues of acknowledgement, the excited pitter-patter of paw on tile as his pup runs into the room. A contrast to most mornings, Rupert does not respond with the boundless enthusiasm and unbridled joy John expected of the
dog — let alone at all. The silence sits thick in the air like a smog, the more of which John inhales the more afeard he grows. He equips himself in a pair of leopard-print Uggs and ventures down the corridor to Rupert’s room, only to make a most concerning discovery — in place of Rupert, in his very bed, sits a block of cheese. A cheese belonging to the holed family. Swiss. Through one hole, Rupert’s baby-blue collar is looped, his bone-shaped dog-tag hanging limp against one face of the block. The block’s colour is a nigh-on perfect match to that of Rupert’s fur, and in some peculiar sense its posture is likewise familiar. As John draws closer to the block, the scent grows, a scent sufficiently reminiscent of Rupert’s breath, which leads him to a disturbing conclusion.
Somehow, by some act of God or the Devil or someone between, his dog has been transfigured into a block of cheese.
The horror! exclaims John.
Come now, John, he mutters. Calm yourself. Think critically.
He thinks critically.
Perhaps, he reasons, his dog had always been of such a geometry, and had simply lost its fur overnight (previously concealing the gaping holes and pointed vertices). Alternatively, could the dog have simply undergone some process of evolution, as the caterpillar into the butterfly, which, in his months of prepuppy purchase research and discussion, he hadn’t happened upon?
Slow down here, John. Take a deep breath. Test the cheese, observe its mannerisms and abilities before making any absurd inferences.
He stands over the cheese.
Sit, he says.
The cheese does not move.
Roll over, he says.
The cheese does not move.
Stay, he says.
The cheese does not move.
Seemingly able to complete thirty-three percent of Rupert’s trained commands, the case for transfiguration grows in John’s mind. Aiding this fact is another — that Rupert, in his (let us say) original state, was never particularly obedient anyhow, having responded to about a third of the commands given then too. He ponders whether the cheese still somehow carries Rupert’s sentience. Of course, he’d require a brain for this. He could always cut into the cheese to check for one, but invariably this act would be deeply immoral should the result be positive. Instead, he gathers his belongings and buckles Rupert (at least, what he believes to be Rupert) into the passenger seat of his car by the collar.
I can’t help you with that.
With what, vet?
It’s ‘animal doctor’, thank you. And that’s a piece of cheese.
He was a dog, animal doctor. Is he now?
I don’t know.
Then I can’t help you.
Do you know any vets who could?
‘Animal doctors’. And no. I suggest you see a turophile.
A tour of what?
A turophile. A cheese expert.
But he might be a dog.
Then see a dog expert.
I’m trying to, but you won’t examine him.
I’m sorry. I wouldn’t know where to start.
Why not?
Why yes? What?
Why would I know where to start?
Aren’t you a dog expert?
Yes.
Then examine him. He’s not a dog. He was. Is he now?
I don’t know.
Well there you go. Good day. I have patients to whom I must attend.
John stands outside the vet’s — sorry, the animal doctor’s office. On the pavement beside him sits Rupert, not as jumpy or readily agitated as usual. A tall, lanky man approaches.
That cheese looks dry, he mutters in passing.
Shit.
Rupert has had nothing to drink all day.
Frantically, John procures from his backpack a bottle of water and begins to search Rupert for a mouth. Perhaps one of his holes leads to the vital organs he suspects reside somewhere within. Alas, he tries each and every hole, pouring water into it, only to see it trickle out of Rupert’s other end. Is this how urination works? John reasons that humans are much like cheese with holes, having among other less crucial holes, one essential hole stretching from oesophagus to urethra through which fluids pass. Perhaps this process has hydrated Rupert after all; the comparability to the hydration-urination process familiar within the human idiom is undeniable. No — this is unlikely. The interval spanning water-in to water-out is much too short.
What to do.
What to do.
What moral obligations does John have to this ‘dog’? Any? As many as he did to the poor thing prior to his transition from
flesh and fur to whey and curd? Perhaps he puts Rupert out of his misery. Yes. This is what he’ll do.
Hello, gun store owner. Hello, gun store patron. I’d like to buy a gun. What kind?
One that can kill a dog. What kind of dog? Swiss.
A Swiss dog? Yes.
A Smith & Wesson 29 should do.
It’s afternoon now, but barely. The sun sits heavy in the centre of the sky as John points his revolver at Rupert, squinting in the heat. Is this really his moral imperative? Doesn’t God say not to kill? He does, but why? Based upon what? Is killing bad because God says so, or does God say so because it is bad? What comes first? Or are they one and the same, one a necessary and sufficient condition of the other?
Grow up, John. Stop stalling. Do it.
It’s the humane thing.
The nice thing.
Existing isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be, anyhow. Existing means death and suffering and poverty and all sorts of terrible things like addiction and murder and embezzlement (of which John is unsure the meaning, but he knows it is bad). Fundamentally, existing entails pain, which is bad, and pleasure, which is good. Not existing entails no pain, which is good, and no pleasure, which isn’t necessarily bad. There is only good in non-existence. There is only good in non-existence. Perhaps… perhaps Rupert, this cheese, whoever or whatever it is, perhaps he’s the lucky one.
At some point during this sequence of thoughts, John had turned the gun on himself. Its end is pressed firmly beneath his chin.
He pulls the trigger.
A bullet leaves the chamber of the revolver.
It travels through the barrel at over six kilometres an hour.
It leaves the barrel and rips through the underside of John’s head.
It passes straight through his tongue, through the roof of his mouth and into his brain.
It leaves the top of his head, followed closely by a Kill Bill-esque spray of cherry-red blood.
He falls to the floor, landing like one of those crime-scene victim outlines, slowly bleeding out.
And Rupert, left alone in the sun, begins to melt.
This (obviously) concludes John Johnson’s story. For those curious, a total of two (2) people attended John’s funeral, while thirty-three attended Rupert’s (a closed-casket affair, given he had fully melted by the time he was found).
The end.
My playthrough of Detroit: Become Human became a weekslong moral ethical spiral that resulted in my drastic change of heart about technology and also sending a text asking if our toaster was sad. Let me explain.
Detroit: Become Human is a 2018 game set in an imagining of 2038 Detroit where incredibly human-like androids live as subjugated workers obeying the commands of humans or the corporations that use them as free labour. Following the intense trials and at times unserious tribulations of three androids in crisis, the game is well known for evoking strong reactions in its players — particularly empathy. In an increasingly mechanised world, we have to ask whether empathy is a logical emotion to extend to a non-human thing, and what this means for our future with technology? And in a more self-serving light, I need to figure out if my future android toaster really would be sad.
Ironically, while in Detroit: Become Human humans are able to make the technology to build androids, our main downfall is evolutionary instinct; a common biological dictum of, ‘it has a face, we have to care about it.’ While the physicality of the androids isn’t the primary reason that we give them empathy, it certainly plays a significant role. Facial expressions, tone of voice, and even the presence of blood (albeit blue blood) all play a role in giving the androids a level of humanity that simply would not be present if they were a formless algorithm. When looking at the portions of
the game where the police and army hunt and kill androids, much of the qualms faced by human characters is that they are killing what they see to be essentially human. If we get rid of that physicality, I think that the empathy we would have to any android would decrease despite the already humanising personalities, goals, struggles that each android has. At the very least, the storyline and action of the game would be significantly harder to follow if androids had no physical form. When robots and androids in the media are shown as threats they are rarely given a human body or appearance. The Matrix presents their androids as scary jellyfish, and iconic pop culture classic, M3GAN, Megan ends the movie fully queened out as a severed head. When she is being an evil menace, her human body is removed. Assigning empathy to machines is more often than not distinctly connected to having a face and body that you can relate to.
But in the case of Detroit: Become Human, our empathy extends beyond just physicality and biological instinct, moving into their social predicaments and actions.The androids, like a lot of us, are stuck in shitty jobs, working for mega-corporations who see us, in many cases, as subhuman. The somewhat socialist revolution of the androids under robot Che Guevara, Markus, is one that most left-leaning people can get behind. Moving outside of the fiction, I think the real reason why Detroit: Become Human caused such a moral-ethical spiral is because it forces us to question
Do androids dream of a socialist utopia?
uncomfortable truths about humans, and what on earth we are actually good for. Just like how the debate about generative AI and ChatGPT in the creative world is less about AI itself and more about the value and role of creatives, the debate of androids is less about the androids themselves and more about the role of humans as a species. If androids come about, what will they do, and I guess, more pertinently to our human future, what will we do?
With naive optimism, I know that if there truly was a new form of intelligent sentient life like the deviant androids of Detroit: Become Human there is enough reason to give them empathy in virtue of their own existence. However, addressing the tech bro-sized elephant in the room, there is a big difference between the technology we could make and the technology that actually ends up being made. In our current world, I can’t see a future where androids are made as anything other than the brainchild of Elon Musk, a little humanoid goblin whose goal is maximising profit and spreading hate speech. But if we leave our current world to the side and consider without fear the proposition of a sentient android, we have to recognise how cool that world could be.
There are two quotes that I think round this out nicely. The first comes from an interview of the creator of Detroit: Become Human, David Cage, who, when asked about how plausible an android future would be, says, “Machines
are going to tell us what we are. If they develop some form of consciousness, it will mean we’re just a machine that evolution has developed to a point where it becomes powerful enough to have a consciousness. But if machines never develop consciousness, maybe that will mean we’re more than that. Then we’ll need to ask ourselves, ‘Then what? What are we?’”
The second comes before Detroit: Become Human, before AI, and before most cyberpunk came into existence, from Philip K. Dick (creator of Blade Runner, and author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) who, long before I was born or having this spiral, was at The University of British Columbia giving a talk on androids. He said, “Where do androids go after their death? But — if they do not live, then they cannot die. And if they cannot die, then they will always be with us. Do they have souls at all? Or, for that matter, do we?”
Androids are humans and humans are androids because we are what makes them and they are a reflection of us. The question of whether any of us has a soul is too much to answer now, maybe come back in a few issues and ask me again. At any rate, I think I can say that androids probably dream of a socialist utopia for the same reasons we do.
