🎷✨The Nexialist #0118

a part of you | hyperindustry of the artificial imaginary | mechanomorphism | caroline polachek's pure velocity | Яitual | dehumanizing trans folks | the party is already over

Apr 27, 2023

welcome to another week of hyper-linking links and brainsparking brains, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this e-mail finds you well. today is a holiday here in the netherlands, koningsdag, aka king’s day, but i’ll not get much into that (though i will be walking around the city, probably drinking alcohol and possibly getting tired very early). read until the end for some paradoxical and ambivalent thoughts, hypnotizing videos and (hopefully) new ideas to help us see the world. enjoy 🫀

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🎷a part of you

i know i share a lot of ai-generated music videos here, but i just can’t help myself. this one is super hypnotizing and hyper-stimulating, as it seems to merge so many worlds that i enjoy with pop-culture iconic themes: disco, choreography, space, astronauts, ETs, octopi, chimeras, zombies. it’s simultaneously entertaining and scary to watch this incredibly fast and almost amorphous blob of entertainment. i couldn’t help but connect it to the centaur mindset (tn#106). directed by rart.

💭hyperindustry of the artificial imaginary

i’m loving this series of videos from vox helping us understand AI a bit better. in this one, phil edwards shows us how tiktok dances were used to train AI. it seems that anything we do, online or offline, can now be used to train these models. remember the mannequin challenge? that also. “the quest is for “ground truth” — real-world examples that can be used to train or grade an AI on its guesses. TikTok datasets provide this by showing lots of movement, clothing types, backgrounds, and people. That diversity is key to train a model that can handle the randomness of the real world.”

could this be a new iteration of the super industry of the imaginary (tn#28), where we work for free to create even more value for the big-tech companies. maybe now it’s the hyperindustry of the artificial imaginary?

🤖mechanomorphism

tf_dao

A post shared by Thousand Faces Club | Creator Economy Central (@tf_dao)

thank you, gustavo, for sharing this with me. this new word has not left my mind since i watched it. futures theorist, luke robert mason, points out how digital influencers (and i would include people who use social platforms, in general), are roboticizing or mechanomorphizing, in order to fit in with the algorithm. i’ve transcribed his thought:

the thing with online content creators is they’re always looking to achieve the lowest common denominator. in many ways, human online influencers have roboticized themselves. they’ve mechanomorphized themselves.
so, this idea of anthropomorphism is where we attribute human […] characteristics to objects. but mechanomorphism is where we attribute robotic attributes to human beings. and influencers, by chasing the algorithm of social media, they’re already mechanomorphizing themselves.
and these tools are ideally designed to produce these sorts of things that the algorithm wants to see. so what we’re gonna have is influencers having chatgtp-generated tweets, or summaries of their podcasts, or explanations of what they’re doing in certain videos or maybe coming up with certain ideas. and what we’re gonna see is not creativity but homogeneity, homogenous forms of output.

some time ago, i shared about fembots (tn#17), or why sexy robots (and virtual influencers) are taking over the internet. it is exactly what mason mentioned. i found a definition that is broader, but still one to keep in mind.

mechanomorphism (noun) - mech·a·no·mor·phism
: a conception of something (as the universe or a living creature) as operating mechanically or to be fully accounted for according to the laws of physical science

of course, the concept that keeps coming back is ontological design (tn#3), and this time with a quote that lives rent-free in my head:

We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us. — Marshall McLuhan

☄️caroline polachek’s pure velocity

i ~~mentioned~~ fangirled caroline’s new album a few weeks ago, desire, i want to turn into you (tn#108), so i was happy to get this podcast recommendation from juan (thank you!). for some reason, i cried listening to it (no, there is nothing particularly touching, except that nate sloan and charlie harding are also super fangirling and it’s such a beautiful interview). i think the clarity she has in the paradoxes and ambivalences of her work brings this depth to her music. i guess just listening to that feeling translated into words is quite powerful.

it got me thinking how, in a world with more ai, she brings these philosophical questions about the human experience. she also talks about the paradoxes of the desire to be eternal and how memorability is unachievable, jung’s archetype in her music, and how she tries to break away from what the industry expects from an artist and their work (even though she is somehow part of it). here’s what she says when asked about the album’s title 🫠

well, this album is decidedly not a concept album. i got almost all the way through making it, before i chose the title, which is of course chorus one of track one. and i chose that title for it, because of the all the [umwelt?] paradoxes.
desire, i want to turn into you. i want to turn in to the subject of my of my desire. that’s fucking psychotic! like, when you’re so in love with someone that you want to become them, that is terrifying! if someone actually tells you that, you run!
but at the same time, you flip it. desire, i want to turn into you. i want to turn into desire itself. almost as this urge to dissolve, to become non-physical, and just become pure velocity, pure momentum, pure force, pure electricity.
and then of course, desire, i want to turn into you. i want to be held. i want to to turn in to you. which is so sweet and tender, and basic. and i just loved it.
i think every song in the album sat somewhere nicely within those triangles of meaning, and so it was a good house for the album. that phrase.
but the more i start thinking about the word desire, and especially as it pertains to the idea of will, free-will. desire started becoming for me like physics, like the force that pulls us through the world. desire is what makes us do anything. is it fate? is it free-will? i’m not sure.
but, i love this link between the kind of idea of pure flow with this music, the velocity of it, the momentum of it, even the headlessness of a lot of the lyrics, as just being dedicated to that feeling of desire, and even getting lost in wether or not we have any choice around it.

read: caroline polachek is surrendering to chaos - crack magazine

❤️‍🔥Яitual

arca is someone else that keeps surprising us with her visuals and sounds. i just love her and her work so much. with all this ai talk and her half-animal, half-human persona, it reminded me of the centaur mindset (tn#106) and maría lionza’s syncretism (tn#44). all about merging different world-views together, like the first video of today does, but on steroids.

🏳️‍⚧️dehumanizing trans folks

“Support black-trans-women. we are your daughter, we are your sisters. know there’s a lot of controversy and misunderstanding. i say be patient, listen, learn and love people. if you resort to a religious context, let it be one that is rooted in love, and not punishment, and not adverdsary. and i think that it’s really important that we highlight the many ways that we can love each other, and respect each other, because that is what is gonna save our human family and teach us how to be gentler, loving, non-violent beings.
we out here humanizing robots and dehumanizing trans folks.
and i think that it’s really important for us to look at the times. trans people are being banned along with the books, and trans people are being banned along with women’s rights, and people’s rights to have any kind of bodily autonomy. it’s just a larger context, and a bigger heart to understand it all.” — Indya Moore

wow, this interview snippet with indya moore gave us all a slap in the face. so filled with truth. systematically, diversity is being erased and banned, while homogeneity and mirrors of us are being created with AI. this could go very differently.

🇳🇱the party is already over

to finish today’s nexialist, a touch of dutchness for today’s holiday with merol’s latest video and a link to her mini-album, alles smaakt beter mer prik.

see you next week, little centaurs 🎠

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