For those of you who have missed it, a little snippet of “From Angels to Swamplings” As your cyberfeminist cyber-guide, I am taking you through the digital wilderness, through the spectral, weird and eerie, the ultra-smooth and the extra murky. As a promise of an odyssey lures me into the digital ether once again. For today, I want us to notice the landscapes of the digital ether, hop on my rickety rowboat, look into its skies, forests and waters and start noticing the cyber-fictionings emerging from all around us. The angels in their enlightened skies, the girls re-colonising the spaces of overexposure, the cyberwitches residing in the fissures of the digital and natural, sharing the forests, lakes, and lands with the cyber-nymphs and cyber-priestesses. As we traverse the wet, the mossy and the muddy do not disturb the swamplings and chuthuloid zygotes. From angels to swamplings, we trace the lineage of spectral bodies that have emerged from the digital ether and their cultures - what Sue Thomas calls - this technobiophillia, life and life-like processes as they appear in technology. What is becoming of us? What are we mutating into? The Internet and its extensions become a realm of imaginings, visions and fictionings of self. As we traverse the clarinet (the web available to us), we start seeing the digital ether littered with new species. Sure, for many these might be aesthetics, TikTok trends or waves of escapism. However, with individuals creating, embodying and manifesting as these cyber-beings, we can no longer treat these as mere aesthetics. We have to consider what values do these bodies embody, who identifies with them and for what reasons are they being used. Are fictionings of the self, girl-attitudes and aesthetics of the techno-bio-philia ways of escapism from the turbulence of our times or resistance against neo-capitalist values?
The culture that thrives in Filterworld tends to be accessible, replicable, participatory, and ambient. It can be shared across wide audiences and retain its meaning across different groups, who tweak it slightly to their own ends. (In Filterworld, everything must be a meme, like a remixable joke or image optimized to travel across the Internet.)
micro-individuality
open.substack.com
After working in fashion e-commerce for years I've come to the conclusion that in e-commerce we do not sell clothes... we sell images of clothes. Compressed, digital versions of physical products. As Roland Barthes pointed out in The Fashion System, a product image is a symbol or metaphor of a product. Media--in this case images--mediates ... See more
@tonyassi on Hugging Face: "MANIFESTO After working in fashion e-commerce for years I've come to the…"
Play my new interactive liminal-space horror essay about technocapitalism and individuality!
alienmelonalienmelon.itch.io