David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks and Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice
I have finished two books that I had been carrying around with me far too long. It feels quite good. David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks was one of them. I loved the first part. It told the story of a tomboyish UK girl in the 80s, who runs away from home for reasons a grown-up could find hard to understand but Mitchell manages to get across just fine. I enjoyed the next part, in which Mitchell portrays a group of young bon-vivants on a skiing trip with all their fun and desires and secrets. Where he lost me though was the really long middle part about a middle-aged white male writer who is very much in love with himself. War reporter, author of books. It drags and drags and drags. It made me drop the book for at least half a year before I went on, still not managing more than a few pages in a row. At some point though the book picks up pace again and it ends just as intense as it starts: In a dystopic future setting in which the young girl from the start has turned into an old woman. Of course there is magic too, a battle of parasitic timelords is the arc that is meant to hold the book together but, well, magic realism can get quite boring when it loses itself in endless new plots just to show how in the end the almighty author manages to show how everything is connected. I got a love/hate relationship with magic realism ever since I have read Rushdie’s Midnight Children (which I liked). If you got no clue what magic realism is about, just check the magic realism bot on Twitter. It’s the essence. Though he creates rich worlds and characters, in The Bone Clock Mitchell sometimes loses grip of the tension that holds a novel together, so in short: This book is too long but when it is good it is really good.
The other book is Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice. It is a tough read if you only find time to read in short spans every other day because it is a bit complex. But I wholeheartedly recommend it if you have got the time for long reads and sinking your teeth in. Which I finally have now that I am on holiday. It is a sci-fi novel told from the perspective of a soldier who used to be Justice Of Toren, a spaceship with an AI that connected many soldiers. So the main character is not just a spaceship but also hundreds of people, all connected with each other in one mind. To be even clearer: dead humans made into soldiers. A bit like the Borg idea but also not at all like it. It is identity sci-fi, playing with what makes a person a person but also with gender (everyone is a “she” – or are they?), power relations and colonialisation. Of course there are splendid fighting scenes too and there is as much social bonding as an AI soldier can be imagined capable of. The book is heavy on the world-building side which I usually do not enjoy that much – endless descriptions of planets, space tech and alien cultures are not my thing – but Leckie does it in doses that don’t neglect the storytelling. I will definitely get the other two parts of the trilogy, too.
P.S.: This is my first time blogging from my phone. Wifi here in the mountains is a bit shaky and this seemed quicker.
Es ist erstaunlich, wieviele Dinge du tun kannst und dir bleibt trotzdem dabei das Gefühl, du müsstest eigentlich noch viel mehr leisten können. Die absurde Sehnsucht nach handwerklicher Arbeit, bei der du im Gegensatz zu sehr vielen Bereichen der Geistesarbeit irgendwas Handfestes vor dir liegen hast, hat mich heute dazu verleitet aus einer schnöden Fertigpackung ein Brot zu backen zu versuchen. Das Ergebnis duftet zwar nach Brot, aber konsistenzmäßig spielt es eher so in der Liga Pflasterstein.
Hier seht ihr es in einem glorreichen Screenshot. Ich hatte es mit der neuen Stories-Funktion von Instagram gepostet, mit der sich Bilder oder kurze Filmchen online stellen lassen, die nach einem Tag automatisch wieder gelöscht werden. Ähnlich wie bei Snapchat, aber. Aber! Bei Snapchat kommt es aus der Idee heraus, Bilder oder Filmschnipsel als Kommunikationstechnik zu verwenden, während es bei Instagram aus einer Inszenierungsidee heraus kommt. Vorteil ist bei Instagram aberr für Menschen wie mich, dass es einfach mehr Leute nutzen, die ich kenne. Und ich mag es, so ein paar Bild/Film-Schnipsel aus dem Alltag von Leuten, die ich kenne – egal ob off- oder online Bekanntschaften -, durchzugucken. Wäre schön, wenn es sich aber auch auf Instagram als Kommunikationstechnik durchsetzen würde. Ein paar meiner Freund*innen posten schon so. Andere ziehen aber auch hier dasselbe eigentlich archiv-orientierte Inszenieren durch. Hm. Das ist ja aber eigentlich schon der Rest von Instagram. Am besten gefällt mir an der Funktion allerdings tatsächlich, dass es dich nicht automatisch mit öffentlichen Likes oder Zahlen wie oft es angesehen wurde nervt. (“nervt” = dazu motiviert, es zu gamen, also etwas zu posten, was besonders beliebt ist.) Du kannst zwar nachsehen, wieviele und wer es angesehen hat, aber dazu musst du es selbst noch mal aufrufen – es schreit dir nicht entgegen wie sonst auf Instagram und Facebook. Ich sehne mich letztlich immer noch nach einem Social Network, ohne Quantifizierung und mit Ephemeralität. Miau.
Was mich derzeit so rumtreibt, ist vor allem die Vorbereitung für meine Future Hiphop & Bass Party SISSY BASS, die ich immer nur zwei mal im Jahr mache und die weniger Deko-aufwändig, dafür aber für mich schön nerdig musikalisch aufwändig ist. Ich höre mich seit Tagen immer Abends quer durch neue Grime, Juke, HipHop, Afrobeat, usw. Tracks und liebe es. Hoffentlich schaffe ich es morgen noch, wieder mal einen kleinen Mix zu machen und ihn online zu stellen.
Tagsüber hält mich seit Wochen vor allem das Booking für MV40 auf Trab: ein zweitägiges kleines Festival, das wir am 21. und 22. Oktober zum 40. Geburtstag unseres Veranstalterkollektivs organisieren. Mit Einladung an weggezogene Ex-MVler*innen – ich hoffe, da kommen auch einige. Wenn das alles so klappt, wie’s gerade aussieht, werden das zwei wunderwunderschöne Tage bzw Nächte. Aber super-fingernägelabknabberlevel-spannend, das Booken für so ein Festival. Dauernd ist noch ein Act oder wieder ein Act in der Schwebe, und noch dazu hatten wir uns vorgenommen (auf Anregung eines männlichen MV-Mitglieds wohlgemerkt! Bless my gang. ^^), ein möglichst von weiblichen und/oder queeren Künstler*n geprägtes Line up zu machen, und erst gegen Ende dann männlich dominierte Acts dazuzuergänzen. Und halt: No fillers, just killers. Bin gespannt, was am Schluss rauskommt – wir können’s hoffentlich kommende Woche verkünden.
Zu der Festival-Orga kommen noch stundenlange Diskussionen, die wir seit Wochen führen, weil (wieder mal) Umbaupläne für das Gebäude, in dem wir veranstalten, anstehen: dem K4 / Künstlerhaus. Das Veranstaltugskollektiv, in dem ich dabei bin, der Musikverein, enstand dort in selbstverwalteten Zeiten, dem KOMM – Nürnberg war einst ein echtes Aushängeschild für Soziokultur. Nun, es gab immer wieder Anläufe für den Bauabschnitt, der jetzt angegangen werden soll, aber diesmal sieht es ernster aus und wir sollen aus unserem Haupt-Venue, dem Zentralcafé, raus – da soll stattdessen ein Burgerrestaurant rein -, und in einen komplett neuzubauenden Kellerbereich ausgelagert werden. Was die Vor- und Nachteile sind, und was uns Sorgen macht, auf praktische und auf ideeller Ebene, das ist ein ganz schön komplexer Haufen Diskussionspunkte, die uns derzeit umtreiben. Auch damit werden wir hoffentlich kommende Woche mal in eine öffentliche Diskussionsphase übergehen. Dafür sitze ich gerade an der Formulierung eines Statements. Knifflig.
Was hat mich noch beschäftigt? Einige Vorträge hab ich gehalten, in anderen Städten, die doch auch immer etwas Vorbereitungszeit gekostet haben, aber allesamt gute Erlebnisse waren. Und ein Interview für den Spiegel hab ich gegeben, das wohl in der Ausgabe vom 23.8. erscheinen wird, Thema Digitalisierung, Social Media. Haben sogar einen Fotografen vorbeigeschickt. Ich hasse doch fotografiert zu werden. Aber war dann doch recht amüsant. Bin gespannt, was rauskommt.
Serien hab ich auch endlich mal wieder geguckt, nach längerer Abstinenz. Zuletzt Cucumber und Banana (Tofu steht noch aus) – 3 abgeschlossene Kurz-Serien von Russel T. Davies (Queer as Folk, Doctor Who, Torchwood) über queere Beziehungen in Manchester. Schon recht clean, aber es ist wunderbar erzählt, von großartig komisch bis tieftragisch. Und reißt sogar nebenbei das Mietwucher/Leerstands-etc. Problemfeld an. Und das von illegalen Putzkräften, die wie moderne Sklavinnen gehalten werden. Letzteres in Musicalform. Groß. Wirklich gut.
Außerdem schließe ich mich dem Lobeschor für Stranger Things an – eine schöne Hommage an das 80er Coming-of-Age Loser-Teenboys Kino, und auch musikalisch sehr gelungen. Ich weiß nicht, ob es deswegen besser gelungen ist als die meisten Remakes, weil es eben kein direktes Remake ist, sondern mit Elementen aus verschiedenen 80er Filmen spielt. Kann schon sein. Das war bei Super 8 ja ähnlich. Und hallo: Winona Ryder! Auf jeden Fall lesen dazu: Jana Sotzko (The Dropout Patrol, Soft Grid) in der Jungle World.
The Night Of bekam ich empfohlen und habe stattdessen erst mal das britische Original geguckt, das den etwas uncatchy Namen Criminal Justice trägt, aber das ich ebenfalls sehr gelungen finde: Jede der zwei Staffeln ist in sich abgeschlossen und begleitet eine Person durch den Strafvollzug. Dabei ist jeweils lange offen, ob die Person schuldig ist oder nicht. Ich finde es vom Erzähltempo, von der Auswahl was für Momente gezeigt werden, sowie von den Bildern her richtig gut gemacht. Aber vor allem die Uneindeutigkeit der Schuldfrage, die dir eine klare Sympathie/Antipathie-Figur entzieht, macht die Serie aus. Das bietet Raum für das Durchdenken deiner Vorverurteilung. Auch eine Empfehlung.
Nevermind Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality will bring a whole new WTF level to everything, and by WTF I mean that it will make many people aware of the different kinds of reality they live and question what even is ‘real’. Pokémon Go, an AR geocaching game turns the whole world into a playing field. You can catch Pokémon wherever you are, little and big (mostly) public spots become Pokestops or Gymns. In this way AR frees gaming of the geographical limits not only of where you can play (which is what mobile devices have done), no: AR adds a layer of gaming to your whole physical world, the gap between gamer and avatar becomes smaller.
Just like the fascination with snapchat filters with Pokémon Go it is the mix of the known and the unknown, the acquainted and the new, that’s part of making the fun so accessible for so many people. The geocaching element makes you experience your environment in a new way – everywhere could hide something to be discovered. You discover things in your environment you’ve never payed attention to before and things you know suddenly become charged with new meaning when you discover that they are Pokéstops or Gyms. Of course it also helps that Pokémon are part of pop culture mainstream: thus the new AR layer has something you are already acquainted to. So you can experience your neighbourhood streets as something new and because the AR layer has these cute creatures you already know it has a reassuring element, is not only a strange new techy thing.
This acquaintedness, an air of nostalgia even for the older ones, might be why even though it has only been released for a few days by now P-Go seems as the ice-breaker for the uncanny valley of AR tech. If Google Glass had been released after P-Go things would have gone better for it. Some might be interested in the Pokémon fever because it offers new ways of marketing stuff to you, and yes, Pokémon Go of course is about making money, and the ways in which it can be used for making money via marketing might be what we will hate about it soon. Just as with almost every new tech thing we let into our daily lives. Capitalism is why we can’t have nice things for long.
I find the side effects more fascinating than the possible ways of exploitation. As if by accident P-Go might be something that help a lot of people realize how deeply tech is interwoven in their daily life. So it might be one more step contributing to end digital dualist thinking: One more step towards an end of thinking online and offline as either/or. Weirdly, when I turned on P-Go while I was on a walk lately I not only cared for the AR creatures but somehow it also seemed to sharpen my eye for the birds and squirrels that crossed my way. For some people it has a similar side effect as the smoking ban brought in my experience: I have gotten to know so many new people thanks to the smoking ban because it made us leave the circle of friends we go out with and it makes us leave the loud clubbing area for a cigarette or two. This has created new small social spaces. A friend of mine said he doesn’t get P-Go because he games because/when he doesn’t want to go out (which I fully understand). P-Go players suddenly go and meet each other. As an Inverse article puts it: “Remember when you were told not to play with strangers? In 2016, everything has changed.” Or as Danah Boyd describes it “In New York City, they ran into their neighbors who, on similar hunts, laugh and joke as they show each other their phones and share a moment. This game invites people to wander around their physical environment and see their surroundings in a new way — even prompt a “see something, say something” response in our security-obsessed world.”
Taking gaming to the streets has another side effect though. I don’t know if the game makers are aware that our cities aren’t neutral places. My bet is that they don’t care. This geocaching AR game reminds us of limits in public space that are set by our place in society. Starting with having money for a mobile data rate to play it while walking through the city. If you follow #blacklivesmatter or #reclaimthenight you are very aware that public space as equal playing field that democratic states seem to guarantee is a very theoretical and fragile thing. Last week-end on my way home from a show I realized quickly that a woman walking the streets alone at night will not hunt down her Pokémon as carefree as a man. Omari Akil has written about how playing it as a black man actually could put his life in danger. That’s just two of hundreds of examples.
We agree on a societal consensus of how we talk about our realities and what is acceptable to talk about, I think in journalism it’s called the Overton Window. This middle ground is only the lived reality for some, for an imaginary middle. We often don’t talk about our different experiences because we are so used to them that we take as given that everyone knows. First blogs, then social media were a massive step in making these different realities visible, for breaking the Overton window. The more different people started voicing their opinions and experiences, the more confusing the world got for those who live closest to the imaginary middle ground. The further away your lived reality is from it, the less problems you might have with a society that suddenly realizes that there is not one single objective fixed reality but that there are many fluid ones instead. The closer you are to society’s middle ground reality the scarier the world has become. Which might be one of the reasons for the big right-wing movements growing: For them giving the realities of minorities more space and more justice feels like their safe narrow world gets taken away. In this way social media have tought us a lot about social tensions, about community forming, about power relationships and much more.
Many people though don’t realize that social media – just like AR – already are a new layer that augments our lives. Geographically seen, social media is an invisible layer – AR makes it a bit more visible. And humans are visible creatures. Pokémon Go is just a silly little game but with its step into using AR as a visual layer over an environment you know it helps understanding in a casual fun way how deeply digital technology is interwoven with our everyday lives. AR taking us outside, connecting us via actual public spaces, taking the digital networked experience to the level of collective experience on the streets seems to hit a nerve. When we discuss platform politics of Facebook, to most people it seems like a “take it or leave it” thing, a neglectable theoretical dispute. Leave Facebook if you like it. That this can mean being detached from an important part of social and work networking still is quite incomprehensible for many people. AR might take social justice discussions to urban space, join them with the discussions about online spaces. When a woman complains she can’t write something publicly on the web without getting a wave of abuse and thus feels restricted in her movement it seems theoretical, ‘virtual’ to many. When she says or shows by a video that she can’t walk along the street without getting harrassed it isn’t. If it takes a silly game to unite people in ways that make them realize their different experiences of the same space it’s a good thing. And if it makes gamers aware that games are real social spaces, I won’t complain. When this gamer is worried about P-Go because “we should absolutely expect everything that happened in MMOs to happen here, because AR is an MMO” I wish he would see that a) life is an MMO and b) MMOs are life (things that happen in the social spaces of games affect real people). But his text shows how deeply this little game already inspires some people to think about how digital tech and life are intertwined.
There’s rightful criticism, of course there is. Pokémon Go shows the power and disruptive carelessness of companies. If your house becomes a Pokémon Gym, it has consequences – P-Go is great alone for all the discussions about public space it sparked. Should there really be Pokémon in Auschwitz? Are Stolpersteine okay? Should Pokémon be allowed to funerals? Should cats or parrots or other cute pets be? And so on. On the other hand the usual conservative criticism that tries to police the careless fun of exploring new tech also has already set in. From calling it not real hence anti-social, and some new kind of narcissim, and writing things like “people don’t have time to go to protests but they wander the streets playing Pokemon”. Why compare these things? It’s not either/or. Play is not not caring. Protest is caring and caring is only the other side of careless fun. As Ted Leo has put it in a song about St. Feliu, “Costa Brava”: Take some time off, drink some wine, (play Pokémon Go!), and “we’ll forget the fright and remember why we want to be brave and that there’s something to save.” So let’s enjoy it, let’s embrace the fun AND the critical tensions of public spaces on&offline and privacy and commercial pressure this little game might make us aware of until all the capitalist leeches will kill it. And, to quote Danah Boyd yet again: “Rather than responding out of fear, let’s step back and start thinking about how we can create more opportunities for young people to be meaningfully connected in an augmented way.” Just as this article on Pokémon Go as the future of learning does.
Does the internet know the pattern of my ups and downs? Does the internet know why I’m quiet, why I’m noisy? When my absence means I’m broken and paranoid and when it means retreat and peace? Does the internet know when I’m all retweets I might be too fragile too offer anything that might spark response? Does it know when I seek dialogue? Does the internet know why there are days on which no word makes it from my mind through my fingers to the screen alive? Does the internet measure the periods between that and my joyful and careless and loudmouthed content? Does the internet understand? Does the internet judge? Does the internet caress all my posts, my tweets, my searches, my geolocation info before it stores it away? Does it kiss them goodnight? Is the internet daddy? The internet is at its best when it stays vague. A liquid multitude being you can’t put a finger on. If the internet wasn’t that hazy *more* than the sum of all the voices with which you connect through/with it, it wouldn’t feel so intimate. The internet is a phantom limb you weren’t aware of having lost. A phantom limb with a sock puppet you hold up against yourself. Does the internet read between the tweets? Is the internet just as overwhelmed as me on the other side of all this content? Does the internet sometimes jump joyfully into puddles of what I have posted so that all the feels splash all out of their categories? Does the internet feel like the fifth wheel whenever I adress someone directly instead of posting to the internet? Is the internet a lurker? Would the internet hurt me? Is the internet a toughguy MPC that would at any time tear a lighthearted post from years ago out of its safe context into the brutal spotlight of so many eyes that it becomes so heavy that it will crush my life? Will it have been worth it? Does the internet understand the complex terms under which I interweave my life with it? Does the internet read the TOS? If no one else, can at least the internet read me? The internet knows that you are dead if everything you do is unsullied, is legal, stays within the lines. The internet knows that it’s not life if everything you do makes you feel dirty, feels like you overstep a line, feels illegal. A sacrifice: You should feed your life at least one daily act of disobedience to keep the world alive. You should feed the internet at least one daily act of irregularity to keep it alive.
I had the pleasure of thinking about VR and art for a talk at re:publica TEN. Some of the first questions I have asked myself are: What’s special about virtual reality, what makes this medium so radically different, why is it considered as significant a moment as when perspective entered painting? I will blog some fragments of my thoughts split up into a few blog posts.
Immersion vs narration
A fascinating point about VR for a user is the disappearance of distance to the piece of art, to the world of experience. Pimentel and Texeira already have written about this anti-semiotic character in the 90s: In VR you don’t need signs that you have to translate – like letters in a book, or pictures on a screen. In VR you can immerse directly into the work of art. They wrote: “Simply, virtual reality, like writing and mathematics, is a way to represent and communicate what you can imagine with your mind. But it can be more powerful because it doesn’t require you to convert your ideas into abstract symbols with restrictive semantic and syntactic rules, and it can be shared by other people.”
To restrict thinking about VR art to only this point would do it no justice though. VR as mere anti-semiotic immersion into a virtual world would mean to only be fascinated by the perfection of the illusion, if not get high on your powers as creator. It would mean to only see the medium as an extension of things like 3D film effects. Something, that helps the audience feel even more like being inside of a fictional world. Yet this is how many makers think about the possibilities of virtual reality right now: as immersion into an experience or as identity tourism. If it’s a rollercoaster ride through cosmos or the stay in an isolation cell, both means thinking VR as possibility to make a user experience the author’s version of a story more intensely.
This already hits on problems when you consider storytelling: How do you lead a user along your plot when she is *in* the story? Classic storytelling doesn’t work when the user becomes an autonomous character in the story. How can a linear story be told if users can look and go whereever they want? Incentives and rewards, copying ideas from games? Well, possible but that means but applying other media’s means onto a new one.
What about forgetting about plot? Could a space to explore be enough? There already exists wellness VR with spheric sounds and meditative landscapes. Or take the Guardian’s VR experience about life in an isolation cell: It works this well because an isolation cell per definition is a small limited space. There is not much to explore and to interact with. Same goes for Notes of Blindness, in which the audio diary of John Hull – who slowly went blind – got made into an audio-visual VR experience. Sounds of the world that surrounds you, original voices telling you their story: both VR experiences mix narrator voices and an experience of a somehow restricted space. It works by setting limits to the user’s possibilities. That’s not really a satisfying solution for the storytelling problem though. It just means not exploring the great specific possibilities of the medium but instead limiting them. The user’s leash gets just a little bit longer. He or she is allowed to take a 360° look, do a few things they get led to do but the author wants the audience to stay passive and under their control. The user is thought as a character in the author’s play.
If VR stays limited like this it might be quite fascinating for a while but the novelty will wear off. Then this path might lead to VR fizzling out like 3D tech for ages, to not much more than a special effect.
VR experience as creative act
A more adequate approach is to see the audience as co-creators of this virtual world. Not placing them into a fixed plot but only creating an environment: a world of potential experiences in which the user forms their own experiences. No complete and linear story that the user plays through. Let the autoritarian narrator disappear. The experiencers (the users) bring their own wishes, ideas, their whole background and context into the VR world. They only create the virtual work of art by how they interact with this world.
So as a theory VR art could mean an ephemeral and personalized virtual experience as work of art: No second person will be looking around in the same way, no second person will interact with the virtual environment in the same way, no second person will create the same story in that virtual environment. Thinking the user as co-creator seems to be more appropriate for the medium. Unlike with books or films you have no finished product / object but it only comes into existence when the user puts on their VR gear and starts interacting with the artificial reality. And it no longer exists when they take it off.
Isn’t it a kind of nice and empowering thought that this way, somehow, about 50 years after Roland Barthes has declared him dead already, with the VR medium the author could die a second time? With Barthes it was about wether or not a work of art should be interpreted against the biographical background of its creator: He emancipated the individual approach. In VR the author dies the death as plot-crafting, storytelling hand. Virtual reality as empowerment of the audience, of the user: Experiencing becomes a creative act.
VR as erotics of art
Or even: In VR experiencing becomes a passionate creative act, a sensual creative experience. Immersed in a virtual world you can act more free of consequences. It is an ephemeral world: there’s no product, no archive. What happens in VR (could) stay in VR. Susan Sontag wrote – even a few years before Barthes (jouissance) – in Against Interpretation that art is not about one correct interpretation. Approaching art can not be restricted to assuming a fixed meaning that quasi was hidden by the creator. She denied that experiencing art correctly would mean to figure out that hidden meaning. Instead she called for an erotics of art and shifted the focus to the emotional sensual individual experience of a work of art.
If you transfer this to the creative experience of VR, you could say VR not just liquifies and personalizes interpretation but does that to the very form of the work of art. It makes for an erotics of art in which the user is audience of and creator of and character in the VR artpiece at the same time, by each user’s very own individual VR experience/creation. Like a wave of pleasure the VR art of work only exists in the moment of interaction with the individual user. Creating while VRly immersed as erotic exploration. It is a medium in which you no longer have a fixed work of art but a liquid plurality of a work of art: all the different threads of experience/creation that different user experience/create are equal ephemeral works of art. The autor who creates the VR environment is but a designer, an architect, is but the maker of tools.
It’s been a while since I have written here – about time for an update! Somehow blogging about things has led me to giving talks about things, and this has turned out as rather time consuming. I have done quite a few talks in the last months, and plan on publishing at least parts of it on this english blog of mine, too, starting with the VR and art one. There were:
“That’s why the lady is a fan” – On the power of fangirling – female fan culture and the internet. I wrote this for the fan culture exhbition “PASSION” and held it a second time last week at Katana, at the Salon der unerfüllten Wünsche. I will hold this one again at Ladyfest Mannheim in July. I haven’t been to a Ladyfest in years but the ones I visited or organized myself were a wonderful experience, so I’m really looking forward to it.
“Reclaim The Night” – About why sexual harassment in nightlife happens as regularly as it is invisible, and what can be done about it. One to encourage people to get loud about this still far too neglected topic. It was for a night that aimed at giving the audience that comes to our (musikverein, the promoter collective I work with) shows and club nights a possibility to talk about this and join together for solutions. I will hold this talk once more at Klangtherapie Festival – a 3 days open air electronic music festival. We’ll see how that goes. 😉
Virtual Reality and Art – I tried to give an overview about what I find special about the medium, e.g. the perspective and disappearance of a narrator, and why I wish more *independent* art would (be able to) explore it. I did this one for re:publica conference and it was a great experience to be there – I filled my head with as many talks I could visit in those three days in Berlin. I had offered them another talk but was asked if I could do one about this topic instead and it definitely is one that I enjoyed wrapping some thoughts around.
Soft Resistance – an older one (a few months) about how digitalisation is interwoven in our everyday lives and about how images led and lead to digital dualist misunderstandings. I had a really wonderful time holding this one in Hamburg and Bremen for data/city/explosion – great people!
Another new date: I have the pleasure to do an ORCHIDfloor (my queer underground club night) at Munich’s Pride at the venerable huge townhall, and I will bring my wonderful mate DOUBLE U CC of Trouble In Paradise, an all female underground hiphop night, with me as co dj. It’s the second time I spin at Pride Munich while there’s still no connection between my local Pride and me. For reasons. Even in 2015 it still labelled itself only as “lesbian gay”, as if visibility wouldn’t be one of the cores of Pride. What about trans/inter/bi folks? “LGBT” is the minimum you should go for if you claim to represent the whole of your bloody rainbow. If Pride is just about making friends with and about fitting nicely into a society that still is quite hostile to many queers instead of making the problems of the weakest amongst us more visible, it’s just a carnival for the oppressors. If I had a lot of time I would sooooooooo like to start a little alt Pride in Nuremberg, without sponsoring, religion and conservative party politics.
Anyways.
The main part of my time I have – as always – spent with plotting shows and club nights with my musikverein mates and we have such great shows coming up: Astronautalis + Ceschi, Mr. Heart + Chimney, and pleaaaaase don’t miss Downtown Boys! And Tommy Genesis. And Zu! And Le1f! My next night djing will be our fabulous 80s night: Dancing With Tears In My Eyes and then Orchid end of june. For that one I have decided to offer karaoke from 22-midnight and have yet to figure out how – this should be fun, the figuring as well as the night itself! Can’t wait. A girl has no shame.
That’s it for now as an update and first step back into blogging. Now that I have reclaimed my balcony from snow and rain, and now that I have finished rewatching all of Gilmore Girls and have caught up with all of Game of Thrones, there is no holding me back! \o/
Hope that there are some readers left after this long break.
A mix that I made to channel my anger and sadness after the racist protests and police action against an arriving bus of refugees in Clausnitz in February 2016.
#refugeeswelcome #1213
Here’s a mixcloud link for streaming and below you’ll find a link to my reanimated my Heartthis.at account from which the mix can also be downloaded.
Shlomo – Apathy (feat. d33j)
Portishead – Machine gun
Chino Amobi – They don’t really care about us
M.I.A. – Borders
Nani Castle x Udachi – Lift the veil (feat. Nire)
Gr◯un土 – FR∞SHINE
Sexwitch – Ha Howa Ha Howa
DAVEM – Some day in the dark side
Gnarls Barkley – Crazy
Acid Arab – Amal
Ancient Methods – Guided by the force of compassion
Royal Family And The Poor – Art on 45
CRASHprez – Love the Police (feat. Lord of the Fly & Otis Franklin) (prod. Oliver Hunt)
Lunice – All clear
1127 – It never drops
Snow Tha Product – Play
Novelist – Street politician
Dullah Beatz – Time
Visionist – Victim
Warsan Shire – Home
Lakker – Mountain divide
Incl. samples from the police press conference after Clausnitz and of Varoufakis at BBCQuestionTime.
I see the need for all the hot takes and opinion status updates in order to find a stable position on grounds that feel frageile after having been shaken up by the horror of attacks – applies both to part of the media as to people posting on social media. Solidarity profile pictures, words about one’s own place in and one’s own view on the attacks, in the context of Paris, of other attacks, of Europe’s refugee situation, of the band’s and the venue’s jewish context, and so on. I understand it but I felt mute. I wondered about this while still lying in my bed, still numb from last night, the collision of the news of the attack on Twitter with being out on a club night, music, alcohol… this surreal feeling that almost has become a new normal. Anyways: For me, nothing seemed appropriate to post. Every sentence that took shape in my head seemed to be a shady appropriation of the attacks. Like the above line about my last night out: It is about me me me instead of the victims. This feels wrong. I rather felt like taking a step back, stand-by. Even retweeting – in all its semi-passive humbleness – seemed almost too much. Even posting my solidarity with victims seemed … stale, empty, formulaic.
Don’t get me wrong: I do see most postings about this as a social effort to reach out to each other, to share fears, connect, to reassure each other, which is all fine and good. Even if they are written in demanding tone. In the face of such attacks the need to reassure one another is simply human. But then human is not simple. I felt less human for reading many of those status updates as misappropriation. Made me feel cynical. As if I was doing human wrong, doing social wrong. I felt like standing back, making room instead of rubbing my point of view all over the attacks. Facebook asking to change avatars to the French national colours was a nauseating shallow peak. I was thankful when Sam Kriss (whom I often appreciate for what I’d call constructive provocation) posted his thoughts on his blog because they made me feel less lost: Sam Kriss – How to politicise a tragedy
“If it’s barbarism to write poetry after Auschwitz, then it’s also barbarism to write thinkpieces after Paris. Don’t politicise; don’t use mass murder to score rhetorical points against your enemies, don’t crow je te l’avais bien dit, don’t play tug-of-war with the bodies, don’t make this about yourself, don’t make this about politics. […]
When it’s deployed honestly, the command to not politicise means to not make someone’s death about something else: it’s not about the issue you’ve always cared about; it’s not about you. To do this is one type of politics. But there’s another. Insisting on the humanity of the victims is also a political act, and as tragedy is spun into civilisational conflict or an excuse to victimise those who are already victims, it’s a very necessary one. There is the politicisation that seizes on death for limited political aims, and then there is the politicisation that would refuse any predetermined script other than the call for liberation. It insists on the political nature of tragedy, not to shunt it towards one or another narrative pit, or to put a left-ish or right-ish filter over the images of bloodshed, but because politics is a way out of all this. Atrocity demands solidarity. Absolute sympathy for the victims; for all victims.”
Sam Kriss’ text also echoes with a reading we had at the Zentralcafé last night: Frank Apunkt Schneider talked about nazi symbolism in german post-punk in the 80s. There were bands in which for the first time after WW2 some young german punks talked/sang/wrote about being nazis in a “we” perspective, right into the face of the elder nazi or ex-nazi generation whose accounting of the past only happened safely at the sidelines of society while in the center people simply didn’t talk about it. Suddenly no one had been a nazi. That silence was deafening. Those punks made people painfully aware of the joy, if not even lust that the nazi generation indeed had taken in humiliating, violating and killing jewish and other people that didn’t fit their sick world view. With faux-affirmative lyrics like “Es war so nett, nett, nett im KZ” (“it was so nice, nice, nice in the concentration camp”) they tried to tear apart the comfy cushions of lies of an elder generation that rejected to face up to its past. Why I’m mentioning this? At the end of his talk Frank Apunkt Schneider made a very necessary dialectical twist: After he had argued for the apparent effectiveness of this back then, he ended with adding the view of the victims and their descendants, and by this showed how this faux-affirmative play with nazi symbolism in the end still is an instrumentalisation of the Shoah for german’s own good that only works if you exclude the point of view of those affected, in short: it only works if you only make it about you.
So… that once more:
Atrocity demands solidarity. Absolute sympathy for the victims; for all victims.
I am aware that my blog post’s point is against its own existence – writing about not-writing in the face of tragedy and confusion. Making it about me. Doing it wrong.
P.S. Wenn ihr Gelegenheit habt , diesen Vortrag, “My Future in the SS” zu besuchen – große Empfehlung. Wie alle Vorträge von Frank Apunkt Schneider. Außerdem hier noch ein Link zu der hervorragenden Filmkritik Georg Seeßlens zu Tarantinos “Inglorious Basterds“, auf die sich in dem Vortrag auch bezogen wurde.
if i had to consider one thing being my super power it’s that i’ve learned to embrace “not belonging”. not as a woman in a male-centric scene and society, not geographically, not as a queer in a straight world, not as being single in a world of couples, and so on – my list is long but not the longest. coming out with any of it makes every sentence you speak perceived as loaded, in good ways (passion! contagiously energetic! inspiring! helpful!) and bad ways (touchy… over-sensitive… taking the fun out of it… demanding…) oh, can’t she for once just be… yes, can’t i for once just be?!!!
difference is a very slow but steady current that makes your ice floe drift away again and again from friends who don’t have to live with it. if i didn’t want to let it break me, i had to find and cling to the good sides of not belonging. and it keeps me alive and buzzing and feeling good and empowered 90% of the time. but then, sometimes, something switches the light out and in the dark it turns against me and then there’s nothing i can do but fall.
opening up about it always seems to be most necessary in the worst moments. the weakest moments. when you can hardly move. when you can hardly talk and if you dare every word comes out wrong. chest feels torn open. tits aching, an unrelatable soft mess of flesh, clawed soft messy meat, twin tower strangers translating into the physical this thing, this wrong, the pure pain of being othered and you succumb, you hide.
you, trying desperately to laugh at your friends’ jokes just to feel less different. just to feel… less. you, silently howling at the mediocrity of every thing that makes you stand out as the ulcer that’s just not gotten cut out yet. you, in these moments: deep throated by life, choking, silenced. loss of language is the worst. every move, every look turns into balancing on the edge of the abyss that then has opened between you and other people, between you and that life from a few hours ago, that seemed to live itself, as if natural. swear to never take that for granted again.
in those moments there’s no help, there’s just loss. you long for a look, a word, a touch that reaches out to you. understands. sees. eases. but: you are ready to fight it nail and tooth just to show you don’t need it. accidental isolation. don’t bleed. just breathe. i really don’t envy those around me.
the toxicity of difference: ever tried fighting loss of control with loss of control?
“Saga however encourages artists to challenge the way their work is being ‘exploited’ online.
[… a self-hosted] video embed much like YouTube or Vimeo that can be changed if you don’t like the context in which your work is displayed. For example, if someone posts your work next to something you don’t like, you can obscure it with a slogan or graphic. If someone is hosting advertising alongside you work, you can even charge them to keep hosting it.” FACT Magazine
(Hier auch ein deutschsprachiger Artikel im Groove dazu)
I also love the Saga idea for other aspects: it opens possibilities for keeping digital art fluid instead of a finished fixed object, and: For playing with contexts. I still think context awareness – on the level of how it produces meaning and of how it is socially relevant – is disappointingly neglected by critical thinking and art. In the for-high-profit tech bubble context is well explored, or another examplet. news media build formally and technically different content for different platform contexts, optimizing it for what users of that special platform prefer and depending on distintictive technical features of a platform). Today profit industry and state, marketing companies, social media platforms like Facebook etc., the NSA – are the most sensitively and aware fields if it comes to considering the emotional, social and political effects of context. Just think of how each of us has a totally different view of Facebook, each of us enclosed in the perspective of their own unique timeline. Facebook though has a god-like view on all of our personalized time lines and it can gamble with that knowledge. Something like Saga shows how embed functions create a similar power imbalance and how to shift this balance. Me, personally, I’m less interested in the profit aspect of this (though it’s all good to aim at making things more fair) but I’m fascinated even more by the possibilities it opens for making critically and creatively challenging everchanging content that is different in different contexts. That opens so many possibilities. It could raise more context awareness. It could be like an inverse mirror/metaphor for our personalized spaces on social media. Less archive, more moment, more ephemerality also could be an aspect. Now once more I wish I was more of a geek so I could try Saga myself.
Go find more info >>> HERE <<< while I’ll stay here and keep F5-ing and suspiciously eyeing the video below and the picture above for changes. ??
