PULP: ISSUE 14 2024

pulp.

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NOT YOUR FAVOURITE BRITPOP BAND

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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.

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

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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.

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Love always, Kate <3 Editorial

Editorial

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

Editorial

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Pulp Issue 14

1. The Quiz p. 1 2. Pulp Photo Review IV p. 2 3. I FELL IN LOVE WITH AN INSTAGRAM PORN BOT p. 8 4. SOPHIE’s Reinvention of Hyper-pop p. 14 5. ¡r/Y2.02K!#¡jsJORKnit!!> p. 18 6. What we cannot see, the camera can p. 24 6. Hiding behind the reflection p. 28 8. fungus gnats and female masculinity p. 32 9. Obsession p. 34 10. Regular Traffic p. 40 11. Fight or Flight/Epitaph p. 42 12. I Cannot Enter Incu Anymore... p. 44 13. The monster, the muse p. 48 14. Rest yourself where? புதுச்சேரி. p. 50 15. Girl with a ______ p. 56 16. ai is a cyborg, not a diphthong p. 58 17. Velocity p. 60 18. The future is in love with the past p. 64 19. @societyiftextwall p. 66 20. Man, Dog (?) and Gun p. 70 21. Do androids dream of a socialist utopia? p. 72 iv

Contents

The Quiz

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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?

Quiz

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Thank you Aubrey Bella Bipasha Izzy Josh Minah Owen Soleil Justine Paul

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Photo Review iv

Photo Review iv

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4

Photo Review iv

Photo Review iv

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Photo Review iv

Photo Review iv

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I FELL IN LOVE WITH AN INSTAGRAM PORN BOT

Connor Chen

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I FELL IN LOVE WITH AN INSTAGRAM PORN BOT

Connor Chen

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I FELL IN LOVE WITH AN INSTAGRAM PORN BOT

Connor Chen

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most authentic and personal project with The 2010s were pierced with an intergalactic soundwave that approached its exploration of identity in the public eye. Unlike ‘PRODUCT’, this album planet Earth. A crescendo of broken is more stylistically consistent, but harmonies echoed down, with a continues to experiment with distorted glistening angelic figure following vocals and electronic production in the behind. Her name was SOPHIE. Pop music collectively muted that day, and the slower-paced and stripped-back tracks.

SOPHIE has transmogrified her sound reinvention of sound was mechanically engineered through SOPHIE’s fingertips through this project — reshaping her — just in time to save the music industry. previous electronic-techno club persona into a conceptual reinvention of who SOPHIE is a revolutionary musician and ‘SOPHIE’ really is — an ethereal mosaic producer who has become an admirable of heavenly synths, broken pounding bass beats, and experimentation with icon in the music industry for her eccentric, innovative style of production. vocal modification. This album became revolutionary for its expression of queer Her journey as an artist began in the identity through its lyricism and eccentric late 2000s with the band Motherland, aural production. In the song 'It's OKay performing live around the UK and to Cry', SOPHIE writes "And I knocked Berlin. In the 2010s, SOPHIE quickly made a name for herself in the European on your front door, that was you I'd club scene through her experimentation never seen before", acknowledging the with DJing. She first gained international importance of exploration and finding comfort in one's own identity as a attention through her dance-pop and transgender woman. The duplexity of techno tracks ‘Bipp’ and ‘Lemonade’, which she often remixed in clubs around identity is also implemented through the hard deep bass, choppy laser noises, the UK. The production of SOPHIE’s unofficially released project ‘PRODUCT’ and eerie drilling sounds in the song was admired for its originality, embodied ‘Faceshopping’, which is sonically in its use of abnormal yet realistic sound opposed to ‘It’s Okay to Cry’, featuring a effects — bubble wrap popping, slurping, celestial piano progression and SOPHIE’s raw vocals. Though these songs are water droplets, buzzing beetles, and stretching rubber. This debut album was a dissimilar, SOPHIE’s lyricism and wall of thermoplastic rubber that divided opposing production elements evokes SOPHIE’s music from mainstream pop, how the expression of queer identity can inviting listeners to peer in and question be powerful, yet ignominious. the ultimate criterion of pop music.

The artistic motivations behind SOPHIE’s projects are what encapsulates SOPHIE’s sophomore album OIL OF an audience's attention. SOPHIE’s EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES is her

SOP 14

SOPHIE’s Reinvention of Hyper-pop

A crescendo of broken harmonies echoed down, with a glistening angelic figure following behind.

PHiE Her name was SOPHIE.

Joshua Hicks

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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

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SOPHIE’s Reinvention of Hyper-pop

PHiE through the innovation and reinvention Caroline Polachek is another artist reinvention of pop music invited that has veered her own musical of musicians, as well as the projects notable artists to collaborate with her, engineered techniques through the eyes welcoming her to twist and contort their they have released recently, such of SOPHIE. Polachek’s track ‘Dang’ songs through warped underlying beats as Charli XCX’s 2020 album ‘how incorporates a muffled vocal repetition i'm feeling now’ — one of her most and electric backing vocals. This was in its chorus with a hard bass beat evident through her collaborations with sonically progressive albums. This album incorporates a range of distorted, throughout the track — a distinctive both mainstream pop and alternative influence of SOPHIE’s music. It also artists, including Nicki Minaj, Madonna, auto-tuned vocals that are paired utilises distorted vocals and sounds that Cashmere Cat, Vince Staples and Flume. with electronic synths and underlying imitate a wobbling metal sheet. Caroline broken trap-beats. A song that stands The aerial perspective on SOPHIE’s Polachek has previously recognised hyper-pop production style has become out on the tracklist is ‘pink diamond’, SOPHIE as an influence to her artistry, which features mechanical, androidly a major influence to many artists and dedicating ‘I Believe’ to her after her their willingness to view music through crashing noises that are coherent with passing in 2021. the lyricism of being a video-chatting her artistic vision. party-girl. The engineered qualities of SOPHIE has mainly produced various this track can be compared to SOPHIE’s SOPHIE has cleared a path for upcoming hyper-pop artists through her song ‘HARD’, which similarly plays songs for Charli XCX, producing her adaptation of electronic and pop music. with a rubbery elastic synth soundboard 2016 project, ‘Vroom Vroom EP’ and Her production style has challenged several songs from her two later albums that is cohesive with a hard bass and the expectations of mainstream pop, ‘Number 1 Angel’ and ‘Pop 2’. SOPHIE glimmery xylophonic sounds. which admirably influenced artists to interpolated her production into Charli’s follow in her footsteps. The creative Artist and producer of ‘how i'm feeling hit songs, including ‘Vroom Vroom’, motivations SOPHIE had as an artist now’ A.G. Cook has also become and ‘After the Afterparty (feat. Lil will forever leave a beauty mark on the inspired by SOPHIE'S electronic Yatchy)’. The power of SOPHIE’s industry. The sound of SOPHIE will and divergent style of production. production is evident in ‘Vroom forever contribute to the evolution of Vroom’, a song which atmospherically Cook has produced music for many music and creativity that comes with upcoming hyper-pop and alternative transports listeners from a quiet hyper-pop experimentation. Music artists, including Caroline Polachek and bedroom to a car on an open highway in the 21st century will continue to Tommy Cash. Though Cook has his accelerating at 180km/h, skimming across cracked asphalt and inhaling the own artistic motivations, he continues evolve on SOPHIE’s behalf, and the cultural reset she had on pop music fumes of burning tyres. Charli XCX has to be inspired by SOPHIE’s musical will be remembered through every legacy, which can be seen through his evolved artistically and sonically as a revolutionary cycle in the music musician through her experimentation recent release ‘Britpop’. This track industry. has a progressive electric synth chord with hyper-pop production, emerging progression and samples the word from her earlier experience in the ‘Britpop’, underlying it as a rhythmic pop-rock scene. SOPHIE’s influence beat. on alternative pop artists is evident Joshua Hicks

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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.

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¡r/Y2.02K!#¡jsJORKnit!!>

Isaiah Gee and Inez Gee

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¡r/Y2.02K!#¡jsJORKnit!!>

Isaiah Gee and Inez Gee

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¡r/Y2.02K!#¡jsJORKnit!!>

Isaiah Gee and Inez Gee

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What we cannot see, the camera can

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 This 68-minute film demands a type with other kinoks, Vertov pioneered an of understanding that is visceral and immediate, one which is grounded in the ideology of cinema that rejected the “fiction film”, offering a critique of how present, rather than being mediated by text or the theatrical pursuits of the actor. narratives are constructed.

It’s still referred to as a documentary, He wanted the material in his films to but what city is being portrayed here be found and not staged. In fact, Vertov anyway? Kiev? Moscow? Odessa and found “old films, based on the romance, Kharkiv all at once? I’m inclined to believe Vertov was not concerned with theatrical films and the like, to be leprous.” the reflection of a world outside of Man With a Movie Camera, and yet the But my experiences observing the — Keep away from them! camera captures something from this movements and developments of the — Keep your eyes off them! world the human eye will never see. city is always a mediated form of — They’re mortally dangerous! reality, whether it be through text, AI, — Contagious!

Born in Bialystok, Poland, in 1896, or constructed dialogue in movies.

David Kaufman adopted the pseudonym Somebody or something is present, telling me what to do and what to think. Dziga Vertov in his early career, which He denied the present state of cinema to guarantee its future. In typical modernist roughly translates to “spinning top” in Ukranian — a name evoking images of fashion, Vertov deconstructs the innate Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie conventions underpinning cinema, the cameraman’s winding of the film Camera (Chelovek s kinoapparatom, dispenses with them, and is still able to 1929) begins with a man climbing out of camera crank. Like many other artists create meaning in the process. Writing in the head of a movie camera. The camera of his generation, Vertov was heavily then assumes the role of both spectator influenced by Italian futurists of the 1923: and participant — hovering amidst a city early 1900s, who proclaimed the end of decadent art and literature. Futurists “I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. in constant motion, it witnesses birth, death, work, marriage, divorce, and the embraced innovations in technology I, a machine, show you the world as process of filmmaking itself. The empty and were transfixed by the dynamism only I can see it. Now and forever, I free streets of an unnamed Soviet city slowly of modern urban life. They called for a myself from human immobility, I am awaken. People start to work and swim decisive break from the old, though at in constant motion... Now I, a camera, the cost of destruction — war and the and sweep. fling myself along their resultant, dismantling of all cultural signifiers of manoeuvring in the chaos of movement, Man With a Movie Camera defies almost the past — museums, libraries, academia recording movement, starting with and the such. all conventions of the movie: there is movements composed of the most no story, no character, no dialogue, no complex combinations... My path leads Russian futurists yearned for a new set. Throughout the film, we watch it to the creation of a fresh perception of Soviet culture, aiming to displace the being put together. Scenes of Vertov’s the world. I decipher in a new way a Pushkins and Tolstoys that had defined world unknown to you.” brother and cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman percolate the screen: he climbs imperial Russian culture for the past century. “For us, the most important of Our eyes can only see so much, and on moving cars, trains, motorcycles, the Arts is cinema”, Lenin said in the and stands amidst bustling traffic and they see cities very poorly. Even with 1920s, a decade of immense cultural factory lines to capture the energy and technology and the kino-organisation and artistic experimentation. As part machinery of the city. We also see (editing) of others, all I see are Sydney Vertov’s wife Elizaveta Svilova working of the broader Kino-eye movement, Trains and corporate universities and Vertov sought to create a new language ‘Romanticising Parramatta’ Instagram tirelessly to construct the film we are of cinema through the abolition watching. In the editing room, she reels. But I still search for John Razalo’s 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”.

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.

Lizzy Kwok

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Instagram and watch Chungking Express which film is able to construct a new on days I feel homesick because I don’t social reality through the lens of the camera, penetrating more deeply into live in my city anymore. I just dream the visual beauties of the city in which of it and desire to experience it all — we are often blind to. Tryus Miller, its textures, abstractions, sights, and Professor of Art History and English sounds, what is happening now or at a point of time in the past that is not to be at UC Irvine, wrote that the Kino-eye “is not separate from, but an extension forgotten. of the human way of seeing.” It is more akin to an enhancement of the In Wim Wender’s 2023 film Perfect human eye, a cyborgian construction Days, the camera, again, captures something I will never see. Centred on of the future, if you will. In Svilova’s the life of Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho), a experiments with temporal manipulation throughout the film, editing loses regard charming elderly man with a love for for time or formal continuity. Slowing 70s rock and Japanese folk music, the and reversing time, Svilova disrupts the camera follows his everyday life as he linear progression, inviting the human cleans Tokyo toilets, visits the sento (public bath), and reads Faulkner before eye to appreciate the potential of the bed. Hirayama doesn’t say much, nor is Kino-eye in concert with the art of editing and aesthetic choice. there any traditional “plot” to the film.

But the camera observes the beautiful The global influence of the Kinoand often lonely mundanity of urban eye movement has been discussed life, calling to mind Wender’s earlier work Wings of Desire (1987) where the extensively, but perhaps its most camera floats and flutters across the city interesting legacy lies in the of Berlin, spectating mortal life through participatory Man With a Movie the lens of two angels. Hirayama, to me, Camera: Global Remake. In 2007, is like the angels in Wings of Desire. He artist Perry Bard crowdsourced scenes shot by people from around the world leads a relatively solitary life separate from the other inhabitants he encounters employing Vertov’s Kino-eye approach in Tokyo, studying the city with angel- to filmmaking. The film was broken like attention. On every lunch break, he down shot-by-shot, so that people could takes a photo of the same tree and bows reinterpret and deconstruct his work in their own light. Like the works of Wim to the shrine atop it. He collects boxes Wenders, the Global Remake embraces and boxes of photos, each labelled by month and year, taking note of the tree’s the camera as an organiser of reality, changing shadows, branches, and leaves making something out of the energies of city life. Rather than being a mere — a meticulous observation enhanced imitation of the film, however, it looks by the eye of his Olympus camera. to the past to destabilise the present, and encourages us to question how we can Vertov’s theory of the Kino-eye reimagined the possibilities of the human view and construct reality. eye through a unique kind of synthesis The human eye is limited after all, and with technology. Man With a Movie what we cannot see, the camera can.

Camera is a testament to the ways in

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What we cannot see, the camera can

Vertov’s storyboards.

Lizzy Kwok

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Hiding behind the reflection

Jason Ocampo

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Hiding behind the reflection

Jason Ocampo

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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.

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 Queer theorist Jack Halberstam explains I had been, maybe I would’ve mourned more, yearned more, fought more. the tomboy to be associated with “a ‘natural’ desire for the greater freedoms Eventually I would grow up. On my enjoyed by boys” until it begins to push 11th birthday I picked out a hot pink surfboard — perhaps the dykiest display at the edges of adolescence, where of femininity one could muster — and gender must be remodelled for an appropriately gendered world. I relished my stint of masculinity had come to an in my self-proclaimed tomboy status. I end. felt revered by girls and boys alike. The Yet, my refusal to give into my want to boys respected me and the girls relied appear as the other didn’t last very long. upon me; a mediator between these precursory binaries. I had a sense of my Like many queers, the departure from corporeal capacity to straddle both and adolescence marked my tentative return. all. To exist alongside and in opposition Where the gnats proliferated along sex to all genders; take what I please and revel in the opportunity outside of these binaries at birth, my gender seemed to be proliferating at maturity. As a binaries. child I played Mum’s and Dad’s and The ego of a tomboyish five-year- as an adult I play boyfriend/ girlfriend. Playing old seemed to crack 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.

Fungus gnats live for around 24 days from egg to death, breeding from day 17 and producing up to 200 eggs. Unlike as my other species, the sex of the offspring is not determined by the fertilised egg inversion and sperm, but rather is pre-determined became increasingly by the female alone, with a single egg- perverse. The other girls producing fungus gnat producing only had mastered palatability and I was one sex of offspring. They remind me of confused when things had changed. my mother’s mother and my mother’s Reliance became rejection and respect mothers offspring. I am born of a family became repulsion. They had taken up coincidentally bent on ‘paternal genome roles I didn’t know we had auditioned for. My masculinity had continued elimination’. A family of femininity. past preschool and into primary school Daughters birthing daughters birthing and begun pushing at the edges of ‘daughters’. Judith Butler writes “gender is a kind of imitation for which my adolescence. My once fawned over confidence was a threat to the there is no original.” I was seemingly

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fungus gnats and female masculinity

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.

camouflage of my fungus gnats amongst gendering? the soil had served them well. They had reproduced and bred without my I am a feaster as the fungus gnat is a noticing. Only in their masses had they feaster. We are beings of consumption. become recognisable, and now they I am an imitator and a reproducer — were not to be ignored. They have everything that I have constructed is a overwhelmed my house as they have delicately created recreation of all that overwhelmed my mind. I have decided is around. I flirt with gender and enjoy to leave the fungus gnats alone. Perhaps its spoils as much as I am constrained out of evolved thinking but moreso out by it. I relish in the decay of traditions of conceded defeat. Instead, I water and binaries. I indulge it and I resist less now, move plants outside, give it. I taunt and I tease. I submit and I I, on the other hand, feel entirely bound them some sun (less fungus, less gnats). dominate. I give up to it and into it. I up by gender. Halberstam explains the Outside the gnats feast amongst their love it. We, the fungus gnats and I, live gender of the butch lesbian, particularly fellow muck-loving friends; isopods amongst the decay. They fuck in the soil the stone butch, to become visible and soldier flies and worms and slugs. and I fuck in the sacristy between through the repetitious performance of Each of them eating and shitting and how I feel and how I am. I play as a gender that is “necessarily imperfect, becoming that which they love most boy and I play as girl but I’ll flawed, and rough.” My lesbianism is in — decay. Existences in perpetuity — never be anything other than the yearning and the failures to play as death to life to death — reproduction, dyke. boy. The attempts and the refusal to be reproduction, reproduction. Digging viewed as girl. I was presupposed as girl into the soil all is revealed, an ecology before birth, we are a family of women, of degeneration and regeneration. I and yet my masculinity has always felt wonder about the gender of the fungus, innate. Ordained as dyke, I play the compost, the decay that they munch as both now. At times a upon. How does the sexing of these corporeal compulsion miniscule creators manifest in the and at others an lives spawned out of their non-human exercise in theatre, I love playing dyke in this slavish gender playpen.

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

so l i d a r i ty Hannah Lawrence

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Obsession

Ryan Hong Ming Chua

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Obsession

Ryan Hong Ming Chua

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Obsession

Ryan Hong Ming Chua

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Regular Traffic

Grant Perez

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Fight or Flight

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Aoife Brazil

Epitaph

Aoife Brazil

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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

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

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I Cannot Enter Incu Anymore...

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.

Cecily McCrann

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I Cannot Enter Incu Anymore...

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.

Cecily McCrann

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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 Ways of Seeing, John Berger notes how close and deformed by the sheet, You’ve seen immortality before, “from the earliest childhood”, women demand attention. She alienates us remember? It surrounds you in the are “taught and persuaded to survey form of a woman. You’ve seen her through her body’s indecipherability, [themselves] continually”; to watch face as acrylic or oil on canvas, in asserting discomfort in a reimagining themselves being watched and respond of the ‘grotesque.’ She flattens and bronze that rusts or stone that chips.

You tested her gaze and were surprised accordingly. It doesn’t take a man on the obliterates her body, disrupting how street or behind an easel to prompt us to others perceive and draw conclusions when she caught yours, eyes moving perform. It’s an instinct fed to women about her race, gender, age, and class. as you passed. She was a monument, for the purpose of survival. remember? An attraction and marvel; The movement and transition of her unique and easily bottled into the lens of face is disturbed by the violence of the a camera to be shared and repurposed. To escape this constant objectification viewer’s gaze. Through this, Mendieta and change the way sight is projected She existed only as words in a book arms herself with the aesthetic lens of and you remembered her by the phrases onto them, women have made abjection as a “politicised strategy”, curated by another’s imagination. She muses of themselves. Female artists, according to Leticia Alvarado, had a name that rhymed and a life easily writers, activists, and innovators unsettling her audiences. Deformity, have left behind a fragmentation – an summarised into lyrics and chords. here, is her weapon, as she comments You’ve forgotten the name of the song. assortment of self-portraits, retellings, on the societal biases she endured You focus for a moment and she’s there, autobiographies, performances, and as a Cuban-American female artist. footprints slammed onto paths they on your screen, a billboard, a cover.

Through a series of thirteen vignettes, weren’t allowed to tread. Paths that still rather than one portrait, she not only She’s a muse that perhaps consented to exist today for us to pass through. protests gendered violence, but also the the portrait but not the immortality, and process of racialisation in the United According to Lauren Elkin, to reframe States. Through this performance, she she’s not alone. their immortality, the muse had to hybridises her identity, grounding her representation of self in intersectionality.

Countless women have been eternalised become a monster. Monstrosity represents all a society repulses and In her introductory essay from the and remembered as muses rather than ejects. As the borders of normality are catalogue of her 1980 exhibition, themselves throughout European built, all that is deemed ‘monstrous’ Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of history— for appearing rather than is cut off and forced to dwell at this Third World Women Artists of the United acting. Beauty, competition, vanity, States, Mendieta writes that “as noninnocence, judgement, possession, and boundary. Monstrosity is therefore defined by “difference and excess.” white women our struggles are two-fold. submission are immortalised into a This exhibition points not necessarily to spectacle for so-called femininity to be To be in and represent a female body the injustice or incapacity of a society surveyed. This has bred an assumption in the early twenty-first century is to explore the beautiful and discarded, that has not been willing to include us, and an inheritance of performance. In

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The monster, the muse

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 of installation is about creating spaces immortalised identities and muses can that cannot necessarily be trusted. not and should not be static. If one is Photographs are a product of the person and environments that respond to a behind the lens, and therefore can easily system. One must walk into the piece to to live forever, through art or other prove its existence. Similarly, a woman means, then they must also be allowed manipulate and mislead. must speak to ensure her existence isn’t to change. Art needs to encapsulate shifts, breaks, moments of growth ignored.

While women are told to take up less or deterioration, and the moments in space and draw less attention, they between. Elkin writes that “nothing, are simultaneously objectified into the Elkin speaks to this idea of women not even art, can be mummified and transgressing against the restrictions role of the eternal subject, hung on a preserved forever and that we wouldn’t of space through the concept of a wall or a pedestal for others to gawk at. However, this doesn’t mean women “flâneuse”. A feminisation of the French want it to be.” word, ‘flâneur’, which originally never gazed back or tried to reinvent what it means to see. Voice was and still described a man who wanders aimlessly, Immortality isn’t the final goal. It’s filling spaces with a presence, memory, is used by women to make themselves she subverts the expected role of a history, and story that is real and woman in a cityscape. By becoming material and assert themselves into changing that matters. Rather than the dawdler, observer, and surveyor, the a space that preferred apologies or silence. American installation artist Ann flâneuse rejects the role of the passive apologise for the space we take up, we Hamilton demonstrated this tendency by muse, the objectified, and the voyeur’s must revel in it. It’s important to pass down truths and experiences for people asking her class of mostly young women victim. Suddenly, space becomes to relate to. Perhaps they will discard it, to carry around a 4 x 8 sheet of plywood something a woman can claim and find it irrelevant, misunderstand it, or remake. with them for a week so they could ignore it as they pass by on the street. “get used to taking up more space”. On public transport, they found themselves In our contemporary context, women’s Perhaps they will be inspired. Either way, we need to give them the chance immortalisation of themselves has crammed between strangers’ bodies and a material that belonged to walls. It expanded into countless new artistic and — the agency — to decide. followed them home and to class. They interdisciplinary forms. Photography, mixed-media, collage, projections, had to live with the scale of the space performance, movement, and sound they took up at every moment. While many found themselves apologising in have been incorporated to represent these moments, after a while, they also women as a multiplicity of identities, in resented the need for politeness. These a constant state of flux and movement, reactions allowed Hamilton to illustrate and in ‘unconventional’ or supposedly how art is social and a lived process that ‘unappealing’ forms and bodies. enters every aspect of one’s life. The art However, it’s important to note that Freja Newman

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Rest yourself where? pபுதுச்சேரி.

Ashray Kumar

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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.

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Rest yourself where? pபுதுச்சேரி.

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

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Rest yourself where? pபுதுச்சேரி.

Ashray Kumar

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gir 56

Girl with a ________

rl

with a ...

Nina Wang

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ii.

i.

You are standing at the foot of turn 16. The track is covered 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 in the same microplastics, rubber, and soot that coat your and slow drivers according to their skill level. With just a soft body black. Grime engulfs all, the barriers that weave and form each corner are covered in a thick layer of dust; excess press of the screen, you can watch the karts quicken or slow char made from burnt tyres, scorched by concrete friction and to your liking.

Where first the race begins moderate, soon the karts the stifling summer heat. accelerate and move faster than your fingers can handle. The higher the speeds are, the more dangerous it gets, yet all are The apparatus is solid and sturdy, and you are part of it despite your softness. Blackness creates the illusion of decay, under the illusion that they are safe. Here, the machine is worshipped and praised like an all-knowing, all-protecting but everything here is as new and delicate as glass. This God. plastic breaks like bones, it degrades like you. Everything here traverses a line between permanence and fragility.

The machine is an illusion that plays with your humanness, This techno-paradise is your boss’ fever dream. To your left, bestows power onto you in the trick mirror you face.

You control the machine, and yet it controls you. You are at a distance, throngs of people are enveloped in smoke, responsible for its successes, but its downfalls are far, far imperceptible through fog. Their silhouettes become an illusion of being and unbeing, a trick of the hazy neon. Their worse, and you are responsible for these, too. You click and click and something deceives you, processes outside of movements take the celerity of an old cartoon, a series of your control, behind your back. Everything hangs heavy on lines and shapes, as graceful as the lights that swivel and turn to reveal people in the darkness where before there were an imperceptible, indefinite article. Everything in sight is dependent on something that cannot be seen or quantified, or none. even blamed at all.

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.

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ai is a cyborg, not a diphthong`

iv.

iii.

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 The camera is the mass at the back of your head. You cannot of a button, everything becomes slow. The lights change to a flashing orange warning and the karts are reduced, instantly, dispel it no matter how hard you try. Your humanness is so to slow motion. The tinny beat of a pop song plays over the heavy in your lungs and they want to watch how well you speakers, it prevails over all. The only perceptible movement hold it there, how well you can suffocate its movements, is the trio of staff that meet at the crash in lightning speed, stifle its breathing. You are a camera of sorts, too. exchanging wordless looks as they push the kart from the barrier.

From opposite ends of the track, you survey the space and staff. You watch how well they can react, how well they can There is no one watching, but now your job is a public occupy the space between suspense and horror. performance that needs to be executed with the precision of The staff are watching you, too. At 15 minutes on the clock a knife. You push down the feelings in your chest. From the barrel of a camera, you see yourself crouch, exchange words — and this part is integral — you call the next race in and press play on the safety briefing video. It lasts for 3 minutes. with the driver who wishes to keep racing and, with another click, everything returns to how it once was. The staff return This gives you time to disinfect, scrub, and place the used helmets back on their rack, assorted by size. The helmets are to their positions and, like magic, the blip in time is erased made from hard plastic, curvaceous and smooth., and build and the wreckage ceases to have ever existed. up on the rack after each race.

From a space you cannot locate, the pop song continues.

It continues, and continues. It radiates from the ceiling, it Your eyes have become accustomed to the dark., Your movements have become mechanical. You cannot afford to is emitted from the walls. It threatens your personhood for reasons you cannot fathom or explain. A traumatic accident is stop or pause, even for a brief moment. not allowed to be a tragedy here.

In your hands are a soiled rag and spray bottle. You cannot You cannot dispel the song from your mind, it plays and recall when you picked them up or from where and, try plays on repeat, long after the crash has been fixed. You exist as you might, the walk from the video room to the helmet in the space between anticipation and fear, in worship to the rack is irrevocable. When you see your hands you cannot recognise your forearms as yours. Your fingers are new and 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 foreign. The veins in your hand that rise and fall with each again, your turn to react and erase. 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 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 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.

Emilie Garcia-Dolnik

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Film. Velocity.

“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.

@fontanesi on instagram

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.

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Velocity

Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, The Paradise Institute, 2001

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Shigeko Kubota, Duchampiana: Nude Descending a Staircase, 1976

Bruce Nauman, Live Taped Video Corridor, 1970

Harun Farocki, Workers Leaving the Factory in 11 Decades’, 2006

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Duchampiana: Marcel Duchamp’s Grave, 1972-75

Zhang Peili, Uncertain Pleasure (I), 1996

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!

Will Naufahu

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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 In the mystical worlds of science fiction, presence, I find we do not waver. the past may be our only tool for Instead, as I have been noticing more understanding the future. 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.

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 Sci-fi writers can be split into two camps: those who celebrate the progress wisdom of the past. technology grants us, and those who warn against it. But if there’s one thing Frank Herbert, author of ‘Dune’, was keenly aware of the importance of the dystopias of the 50s and the space operas of the 70s have in common, it’s words in developing a future that feels real. “If you want to give the reader the this: they’ve cracked the code of the solid impression that his is not here and unknowable future by using stories to now,” he says, “give him the language reflect our pasts back at us. of that place… that oral tool - it has it’s In my sci-fi explorations, I found myself own inertial forces; it’s mind-shaping drawn to the writings of Ursula Le Guin, as well as used by mind”. ‘Dune’ is a and her short story collection, ‘Worlds smorgasbord of language, including of Exile and Illusion’. The three stories, French, Latin, Hebrew and Navajo.

‘Rocannon’s World’, ‘Planet of Exile’ However, Arabic figures as the most and ‘City of Illusions’, tell the tales of a prevalent language of Dune, Manvir

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The future is in love with the past

In Sci-fi, the future is just as much about Singh of the New Yorker highlights at looking back as it is looking forward. least 80 terms (used primarily by the MENA inspired Fremen of Arrakis) with ‘Worlds of Exile and Illusion’ begins and distinctly Arab origins. ends the same way: with tragedy, born in the cruelty of time. In the prologue to Scholars like Harris Durrani, a ‘Rocannon’s World’ and the ending of Professor of History at the University ‘City of Illusions’, medieval queens and of Cambridge, have argued that this exiled negotiators embark on journeys use goes beyond the tokenistic to a into the stars, to recover treasured profound and extended conversation heirlooms and rescue doomed planets. with MENA, and especially Islamic, culture. In his book, Herbert draws from They speed out on mystical vessels far and modifies the roots of Arabic words beyond their comprehension, flying to explore how a language changes over faster than light to planets unknown. time. In a similar way, when he engages They stay for a few weeks, a few months, and return to their homes to with distinctly spiritual terms, such find their lovers dead and their children as identifying Paul as Muad’Dib, he draws from Islamic spiritual knowledge, older than they are. The relativity of time has ripped away the connections asserting the character as something the characters have to their pasts, and more than a messiah. Speaking of the in a way, destroyed their futures. In book’s reference to passages from Le Guin’s stories, there is tragedy in the Qur’an, Durrani says, “Herbert is hurtling towards the future and leaving not merely copying-and-pasting from the past behind.

Muslim sources but actively engaging with how they might be reinterpreted…

We all too often fall into the trap of while preserving their basic principles seeing the future as a never-ending race across millennia’. Here what Herbert towards an ever-receding goal. The past demonstrates is the value of deep behind us is worthless, the future ahead a introspection on the past in order to grant his world a sophisticated spiritual glimmering jewel. In her works, Ursula Le Guin allows us to see the future from grounding. a different angle, allowing us to see what Moving forward in time, the 2014 film can’t be seen. To see where we will go, we must look at where we have come ‘Interstellar’ —a movie famous for its use of theoretical physics to inform and from. 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.

Zoe Hercus

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@societyiftextwall

@societyiftextwall

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@societyiftextwall

@societyiftextwall

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For S and P.

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 I write this now to present to you my grows. He equips himself in a pair of account of a most hornswoggling tale. leopard-print Uggs and ventures down It may not, in contrast to much of the the corridor to Rupert’s room, only to text you plausibly engage with, be a make a most concerning discovery — story of celestial proportionality — to in place of Rupert, in his very bed, sits the contrary, it concerns something so a block of cheese. A cheese belonging particular, so localised, that it includes to the holed family. Swiss. Through but one principal character. John one hole, Rupert’s baby-blue collar Johnson is a man unremarkable in all respects besides his head. By this, I do is looped, his bone-shaped dog-tag hanging limp against one face of the not mean to suggest his possession of any noteworthy cognitive abilities, nor block. The block’s colour is a nigh-on sexual. Rather, John Johnson possesses perfect match to that of Rupert’s fur, and in some peculiar sense its posture is a head of such scale, hairlessness, and shine that many passersby believe it to likewise familiar. As John draws closer indeed be luminous. Upon first meeting, to the block, the scent grows, a scent sufficiently reminiscent of Rupert’s many presume he puts this cranial quasi-luminosity to good use, perhaps by breath, which leads him to a disturbing working in a mine or routinely camping conclusion. (since, the aforementioned many reason, Somehow, by some act of God or the in each case a head-torch would cease to be necessary). Alas, I do digress, for Devil or someone between, his dog has been transfigured into a block of cheese. this story concerns itself not with the aesthetic defects of John Johnson, but an unmistakable tragedy that befell him The horror! exclaims John. on a relatively unremarkable Thursday Come now, John, he mutters. Calm morning. yourself. Think critically.

The sun rises, as it is wont to do at the start of each day. John Johnson sits erect He thinks critically. in his bed, and is moreover upright.

Perhaps, he reasons, his dog had always Indulging his like of habit, he stands and performs a brief, mostly superfluous been of such a geometry, and had simply lost its fur overnight (previously stretching routine before opening his bedroom door and calling his dog in for concealing the gaping holes and pointed vertices). Alternatively, could the dog a morning snuggle. have simply undergone some process of evolution, as the caterpillar into the Rupert, he calls. butterfly, which, in his months of prepuppy purchase research and discussion, Rupert, he calls again. he hadn’t happened upon?

There is no verbal response, as is regular for Rupert — a corollary of his doghood. Slow down here, John. Take a deep breath. Test the cheese, observe its However, John had come to anticipate mannerisms and abilities before making non-verbal cues of acknowledgement, any absurd inferences. the excited pitter-patter of paw on tile as his pup runs into the room. A contrast He stands over the cheese. to most mornings, Rupert does not respond with the boundless enthusiasm and unbridled joy John expected of the Sit, he says.

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Man, Dog (?) and Gun.

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?

flesh and fur to whey and curd? Perhaps See you on the other side, Rupert. he puts Rupert out of his misery. Yes. He pulls the trigger.

This is what he’ll do.

A bullet leaves the chamber of the revolver.

Hello, gun store owner.

It travels through the barrel at over six Hello, gun store patron. kilometres an hour.

I’d like to buy a gun.

It leaves the barrel and rips through the What kind? underside of John’s head.

One that can kill a dog.

It passes straight through his tongue, What kind of dog? through the roof of his mouth and into Swiss. his brain.

A Swiss dog?

John stands outside the vet’s — sorry, It leaves the top of his head, followed Yes. the animal doctor’s office. On the closely by a Kill Bill-esque spray of pavement beside him sits Rupert, not as A Smith & Wesson 29 should do. cherry-red blood. jumpy or readily agitated as usual. A tall, He falls to the floor, landing like one It’s afternoon now, but barely. The lanky man approaches. of those crime-scene victim outlines, sun sits heavy in the centre of the sky slowly bleeding out. as John points his revolver at Rupert, That cheese looks dry, he mutters in And Rupert, left alone in the sun, begins squinting in the heat. Is this really his passing. moral imperative? Doesn’t God say not to melt. to kill? He does, but why? Based upon Shit.

This (obviously) concludes John what? Is killing bad because God says Rupert has had nothing to drink all day. so, or does God say so because it is bad? Johnson’s story. For those curious, a What comes first? Or are they one and total of two (2) people attended John’s the same, one a necessary and sufficient funeral, while thirty-three attended Frantically, John procures from his Rupert’s (a closed-casket affair, given condition of the other? backpack a bottle of water and begins he had fully melted by the time he was to search Rupert for a mouth. Perhaps found).

Grow up, John. Stop stalling. one of his holes leads to the vital Do it. organs he suspects reside somewhere The end.

It’s the humane thing. within. Alas, he tries each and every The nice thing. hole, pouring water into it, only to see Existing isn’t all that it’s cracked up to it trickle out of Rupert’s other end. Is this how urination works? John reasons be, anyhow. Existing means death and that humans are much like cheese with suffering and poverty and all sorts of terrible things like addiction and murder holes, having among other less crucial and embezzlement (of which John is holes, one essential hole stretching unsure the meaning, but he knows it is from oesophagus to urethra through which fluids pass. Perhaps this process bad). Fundamentally, existing entails pain, which is bad, and pleasure, which has hydrated Rupert after all; the comparability to the hydration-urination is good. Not existing entails no pain, process familiar within the human idiom which is good, and no pleasure, which is undeniable. No — this is unlikely. The isn’t necessarily bad. There is only good interval spanning water-in to water-out is in non-existence. There is only good in non-existence. Perhaps… perhaps much too short.

Rupert, this cheese, whoever or whatever it is, perhaps he’s the lucky one.

What to do.

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.

At some point during this sequence of thoughts, John had turned the gun on What moral obligations does John have himself. Its end is pressed firmly beneath to this ‘dog’? Any? As many as he did to his chin. the poor thing prior to his transition from What to do.

Jacob Murray

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My playthrough of Detroit: Become Human became a weeks- the game where the police and army hunt and kill androids, long moral ethical spiral that resulted in my drastic change of much of the qualms faced by human characters is that they heart about technology and also sending a text asking if our are killing what they see to be essentially human. If we get rid of that physicality, I think that the empathy we would toaster was sad. Let me explain. have to any android would decrease despite the already Detroit: Become Human is a 2018 game set in an imagining humanising personalities, goals, struggles that each android has. At the very least, the storyline and action of the game of 2038 Detroit where incredibly human-like androids live would be significantly harder to follow if androids had no as subjugated workers obeying the commands of humans physical form. When robots and androids in the media are or the corporations that use them as free labour. Following the intense trials and at times unserious tribulations of three shown as threats they are rarely given a human body or appearance. The Matrix presents their androids as scary androids in crisis, the game is well known for evoking jellyfish, and iconic pop culture classic, M3GAN, Megan strong reactions in its players — particularly empathy. In ends the movie fully queened out as a severed head. When an increasingly mechanised world, we have to ask whether empathy is a logical emotion to extend to a non-human thing, she is being an evil menace, her human body is removed. and what this means for our future with technology? And in Assigning empathy to machines is more often than not distinctly connected to having a face and body that you can a more self-serving light, I need to figure out if my future relate to. android toaster really would be sad.

But in the case of Detroit: Become Human, our empathy Ironically, while in Detroit: Become Human humans are extends beyond just physicality and biological instinct, able to make the technology to build androids, our main moving into their social predicaments and actions.The downfall is evolutionary instinct; a common biological androids, like a lot of us, are stuck in shitty jobs, working for dictum of, ‘it has a face, we have to care about it.’ While the physicality of the androids isn’t the primary reason that mega-corporations who see us, in many cases, as subhuman.

The somewhat socialist revolution of the androids under we give them empathy, it certainly plays a significant role. robot Che Guevara, Markus, is one that most left-leaning Facial expressions, tone of voice, and even the presence of blood (albeit blue blood) all play a role in giving the androids people can get behind. Moving outside of the fiction, I think a level of humanity that simply would not be present if they the real reason why Detroit: Become Human caused such were a formless algorithm. When looking at the portions of a moral-ethical spiral is because it forces us to question

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Do androids dream of a socialist utopia?

uncomfortable truths about humans, and what on earth we are are going to tell us what we are. If they develop some actually good for. Just like how the debate about generative form of consciousness, it will mean we’re just a machine AI and ChatGPT in the creative world is less about AI itself that evolution has developed to a point where it becomes powerful enough to have a consciousness. But if machines and more about the value and role of creatives, the debate never develop consciousness, maybe that will mean we’re of androids is less about the androids themselves and more more than that. Then we’ll need to ask ourselves, ‘Then about the role of humans as a species. If androids come about, what will they do, and I guess, more pertinently to our what? What are we?’” human future, what will we do?

The second comes before Detroit: Become Human, before AI, and before most cyberpunk came into existence, from With naive optimism, I know that if there truly was a new Philip K. Dick (creator of Blade Runner, and author of Do form of intelligent sentient life like the deviant androids Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) who, long before I was of Detroit: Become Human there is enough reason to give born or having this spiral, was at The University of British them empathy in virtue of their own existence. However, Columbia giving a talk on androids. He said, “Where do addressing the tech bro-sized elephant in the room, there androids go after their death? But — if they do not live, then is a big difference between the technology we could make they cannot die. And if they cannot die, then they will always and the technology that actually ends up being made. In be with us. Do they have souls at all? Or, for that matter, do our current world, I can’t see a future where androids are made as anything other than the brainchild of Elon Musk, a we?” little humanoid goblin whose goal is maximising profit and Androids are humans and humans are androids because we spreading hate speech. But if we leave our current world are what makes them and they are a reflection of us. The to the side and consider without fear the proposition of a sentient android, we have to recognise how cool that world 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 could be. again. At any rate, I think I can say that androids probably dream of a socialist utopia for the same reasons we do.

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 China Meldrum

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Quiz Answers 1: Rhodes 2: The Deer Hunter 3: Victorian 4: The Netherlands 5: Dublin, Flanders, Killashandra 6: Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks 7: Division of Korea 8: Sofia Coppola 9: Odysseus 10: T-shirt under suit jacket 11: Trouble, difficulty 12: Brazil, Samoa and Papua New Guinea 13: Beetroot 14: Half-Life 15: Charles de Gaulle 16: Rodion 17: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young 18: Livy 19: Shitposting 20: New Zealand

Contributors

Nina Wang Emilie Garcia-Dolnik Jacob Murray Ashray Kumar Hannah Lawrence Jason Ocampo Connor Chen Isaiah Gee Freja Newman Aoife Brazil Joshua Hicks Zoe Hercus Ryan Hong Ming Chua Will Naufahu Cecily McCrann Lizzy Kwok China Meldrum

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ISSUE 14