News from the Collective

The work in the current exhibition  ‘We Work Like Peasants While AI is Out There Painting and Writing Poetry’ at POST Nijmegen (NL) is hopeful. The hope is, according to Lieke Wouters’ introduction in the accompanying brochure, that we might all become Luddites.

“Ever since the Luddite uprising was put down in 1810s, working people have been locked into a similar state of anxiety over how technology will impact our livelihoods. For two hundred years, we have rarely been free from concern that this machine or that program will make our work redundant, less skilled, or simply worse”, according to Brian Merchant in his seminal book on the Luddite struggles. Today, these concerns are mainly focused on the advances in artificial intelligence and surveillance. There is renewed attention for refusal, resistance and re-imagining of technological innovations at work by digital Luddites or more general through algorithmic Ludditism. At the exhibition, on display until may 11, you can immerse yourself with some of the most recent artistic efforts in this direction.

The artists in this exhibition are critiquing bullshit jobs and algorithmic exploitation, creatively mobilizing against work algorithms. They work against, and look beyond, the dystopia of inhuman societies and numbing labor. It is indeed reminiscent of the Luddite struggle, but applied artistically to today’s technological innovations. It shows the promise of this type of work and evokes further experimentation and creative resistance for the future.

Unlike the Luddites, these artists are not actually smashing the physical infrastructure of oppressive technologies. They are showing different ways to resist and reimagine the possibilities of creative disruption and opposition. An example is Ana-Maria Cojocaru’s 2174: Future ruins of an Automated Past that visualizes the current repulsive design of self-service checkouts and entrance gates in supermarkets and shows how in the future these places might be left ruined, destroyed and abandoned. Such visualizations question and provoke. It could be supplemented with further calls to action, for example Not to Go to the Albert Heijn anymore, or invitations to defiant research on how to counter supermarket surveillance like the Miscalculating Risk project that varia hosted in Rotterdam, or which La Quadrature du Net is working on. There could be more literature available and further linking of actual social movements working in this direction. Still, the exhibition proves a welcoming starting point for imagining creative forms of conspiring against such development we all encounter in our everyday lives.

The more moving work in the exhibition is a three-channel video Unknown Label by Nicolas Gourault about the “invisible, underpaid and sometimes mind-numbing labor to support new automation processes.” It shows the work of microworkers that are employed to draw the outlines of people and objects in video footage of self-driving cars. They talk about their questions and dreams during this monotonous work, and we can listen to the music they put on while doing their tasks. The video also narrates how workers investigate ways to use for example a VPN to be able to work as though they are from another country with higher wages. It connects you with these ‘ghost workers’ and gives insight into the micro-resistance they engage in. It is about their personal habits, thoughts, the patterns of their everyday work life. It shows the interfaces they have at their disposal.

The video offers a close look at the complexities of today’s work related resistance. Luddites’ of today have to engage with data mining, abstract power relations, uncertain futures, chokepoints of creative labor markets, and all kinds of technologically erected barriers to alternatives, as Jathan Sadowski argues in The Mechanic and The Luddite (2025). The video supplements the abstract analyses, and the tactics and strategies of algorithmic agency as recently theorized by Tiziano Bonini and Emiliano Treré in their 2024 book Algorithms of Resistance. In this video a more embodied and personal story is shown which tugs you in. Through the personal encounters, we might get a feel for some of the existing weapons of the weak for today’s world.

The tech platforms and systems can, and must, be resisted collectively. It needs some plan or collaborative strategy. Logjams could be one of them. Tytus Szabelski-Rozniak shows in the exhibition a trio of blue panels that explain what a logjam can bring about. A logjam is for example created when you order many cheap items to one place. What happens next? Many riders could appear in one place. It is possible to agitate among the riders. Media attention could be used. A strike could be called. The panels show such possibilities in rather simple diagrams. Does the strike succeed when there are platform negotiations? Would the platform rise wages for non-strikers? Or can we envision new relations between riders and for example restaurant owners? Should we even consider establishing a novel co-op platform? It likely all starts with protest or subversion. The outcomes will often not be what we hope. But we can at least creatively investigate the options and map out probable outcomes. We better come prepared. The panels oversimplify and suggest some clear logic for what in real life will be more fuzzy processes, but at least they visualize some more hopeful Luddite inspired disruptions, and some scenarios to better avoid.

I certainly got hope it will lead to further collective action and more (future) instances of Luddite resistance. As Craig Gent recently wrote in his book Cyberboss: “While technologies of management are intended to curb and direct worker (mis)behaviour and extend control to every corner of the workplace, worker resistance demonstrates guile against adversity, displaying cunning intelligence to re-thread power and technology against management”. Indeed, this is the hope that this accessible and congenial exhibition conveys.

Maybe not all of us will become Luddites. Still, as the machines are ‘hurtful to commonality’ according to the writings of the Luddites (that Kevin Binfield collected) we can at least involve as much people as possible and insist on the commonalities between us all. In this way multiple forms of resistance can be connected, and collective concerns can be shared. We would need more exhibitions like this, we could engage more people, organize workshops and exchanges like the ECHO event during this exhibition, and learn from each other’s experiences. As this exhibition is nicely situated in de Paraplufabrieken, next to the publisher and printer Proces-Verbaal, a hairdresser, the nice atelier of the performance duo Naaistreek and also the bookkeepers of Buro Queer, it made me think how to further find commonalities in these surroundings. And also how to get even more self-organized collectives and social movements involved. I think the connection to (former) squats or the kind of infoshop (56a) that Sanela Jahiç shows in the exhibited work “No to AI, Yes to a Non-fascist Apparatus” could be important. Especially when, as Dan McQuillan (as part of this work) explains, the technologies get ever more necropolitical and fascist. More artists and designers, writers and academics, activists and publishers, hairdressers and bookkeepers, could and should be somehow involved.

Artists are the ones taking the lead here, while they are themselves also under pressure of platforms and algorithms. Artists struggle with AI that takes over painting and writing poetry, like the exhibition title states. But there is also something promising, as these artists seem to be able to take up Luddite action against work as the main concern of their work. It is interesting to see where this leads to in the future. Like Alina Lupa shows, contributing an opening performance to this exhibition, artistic protest and opposition can be empowering, investigative, promising. It can lead to further future organizing and experimentation. And maybe, by explicitly relating to and resisting new technological developments and by taking cues from the Luddites, it can become even more so.

Will artists all become Luddites in the future? Well, at least this exhibition invites further bold creative inquiry of work in relation to latest technological developments. Luddism surely remains a prominent and provocative source of inspiration for further developing this in the future. Can we force the hidden operations of contemporary tracking and surveillance into view and (at least temporary) annul their effects, like the Luddites already did with earlier technological innovations some 200 years ago? How to take this on without being “crushed by the full power of a violent state” as, in the words of Brian Merchant, the Luddites were back in the days? Andrew Culp and Thomas Dekeyser propose in Counter Signals 5 (2024) that it is about finding new forms of sabotage that evolves “alongside the social-technological transformation of computing”. They propose we look at the work of CLODO (Comité Liquidant ou Détournant les Ordinateurs), or the protesters in Hong Kong which were tearing down surveillance cameras “not simply to render them inoperative, but to photograph, from up close, the products and logos of the large network of corporate-state actors facilitating state surveillance and oppression”. Will artists in the future be ready to develop further creative work in this direction? Just considering this might, I think, at least spark some additional bold experimentation and exciting future creative action.

Los Angeles, April 9, 2025

Dear Geert,

Writing to friends in Europe to explain what’s going on in the United States in the Spring of 2025 is like taking notes on a mental patient to feed to an AI therapist. One can’t capture everything, and there’s no certainty that any diagnoses will be either forthcoming or accurate. In fact, the AI therapist may exacerbate the condition via a reflexive repetition that confirms confirmation bias. Such is the nature of the vortex in which we find ourselves. Since my last letter, the news has been dominated by first the Signal scandal (I refuse to default to calling every disgrace in Washington “Something-gate”) and then the tariff nightmare that Trump labelled “Liberation Day” for the American economy.

There are so many reasons the Signal chat was front and center in the media. First, and perhaps most importantly, because it’s a perfectly solipsistic story about the media itself: a journalist is inadvertently added to a discussion about an ongoing operation held by people at the highest levels of the American security infrastructure on an insecure messaging app. Not only that, but the journalist is someone Trump and his minions particularly loathe. Jeffrey Goldberg is the editor of The Atlantic magazine and one of his big successes was a well-sourced story about how the flag-hugging president holds actual soldiers in contempt, calling them “losers” and “suckers.” The media has already gone over the obvious issues in the Signal scandal at endless length—just the use of a commercial app to discuss a military action in Yemen  is a first order security breach—but what they missed is how this whole fiasco demonstrates the vainglory of the US’s new, looksmaxxing ruling class.

Looksmaxxing is a triumph of Internet mindfuckery. Young on-line men now have a vocabulary and set of products and procedures that mimic the beauty regimes that women have been subjected to for, well, millennia. Looksmaxxers obsess about the angles (canthal tilt) and the interpupillary distance (IDP) between their eyes. They do “soft” interventions like targeted work outs, cosmetic tweaks, and “mewing” (tongue exercises to shift the shape of the jaw). “Hard,” i.e. surgical, interventions, are the next logical step. To scroll through looksmaxxing TikTok and Reddit forums is to enter a dreamworld that blends “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” plasticity with Incel insecurities.

There’s an unseriousness to looksmaxxing that belies its brutal impact on those it ensnares, and it could only exist amongst the terminally online who are desperate for the approval of those equally under its spell. The idea of using a commercial messaging app to discuss war plans made more sense to me when I started to think of their group chat as a more grown-up but just as unserious version of looksmaxxing that I’ll call cloutmaxxing, a way to signal power. The chat concerned airstikes on Houthi militias, but in the end it was less about communication than it was about vice signaling, a way to demonstrate prowess. The people on this chat were no longer marginal figures. Rising from being rank-and-file members of Congress, keyboard warriors, or TV talking heads, they now have jobs with real real badass credentials. Yet the Signal scandal demonstrates that they are sad little Virgins with new haircuts masquerading as Alpha male Chads (I feel sorry for you if you recognize all this manosphere language— if you don’t, stay away from Wikipedia, you’ll just feel worse at the end).

Hence the now infamous fist/flag/fire triptych emoji that Mike Waltz, the US National Security Advisor, sent to the others in this chat, including the Vice President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense. On Signal, Waltz was cloutmaxxing, emulating the bravado of teenage boys shitposting about their campaigns on Overwatch 2 or Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. Waltz’s triptych signals performative rather than actual competence. To looksmax the part is to cloutmax the script, and what we’re seeing here is the Dunning-Kruger effect of overconfidence meeting the inevitable bubbling-up of imposter syndrome, all subsumed into a cultural battle against what Elon Musk called “civilizational suicidal empathy.”

One of the key figures in this chat was the even more over his head Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth. Hegseth has been looks- and cloutmaxxing since his college days at Princeton. He may have been righteously accused of being a drunk, a sexual abuser, and an Islamophobe, but these are all signals to the MAGA faithful that he’s not restrained by wokeness (or much afflicted by empathy either). Even his on-record mismanagement of tiny veterans’ organizations did not disqualify him from taking over the largest bureaucracy in the world (and its most powerful military) because Hegseth looks the part. He was a host on a Fox News weekend show, and his belligerence to liberals, women, and trans people was amplified by a rugged jawline and suits cut to looksmax his fitness. Rather than a mea culpa after this security breach, the next day Hegseth ditched his American flag-lined suit jacket for a tee shirt to work out with Navy Seals, a sartorial choice that allowed him to show off his guns (tattooed biceps rather than actual armaments). The red-pilled pathos of all of this maxxing would be funnier if these weren’t men who can casually call in lethal strikes virtually anywhere in the world, from Greenland to the Heard & McDonald islands.

Greenland, of course, is now part of Trump’s Greater America project, a return to 19^th century territorial aggression, and a place that Europeans understand full well is actually in danger. Heard & McDonald may require a bit more explanation for all but the most news-addicted amongst us. They are two small islands 2,500 miles from Australia inhabited exclusively by penguins. The US is not looking to clobber these flightless birds with its elite Seals (“America’s enemies fear them—our allies trust them” posted Hegseth after his workout) but rather to hit them with tariffs. That there is neither trade nor even human beings on the islands did not prevent the Trump administration from lumping this territory in with everywhere else in the world on Liberation Day.

Donald Trump has no consistent ideology, and few ideals, but one idea that has stuck with him for years is that “they’re ripping us off”: “they” being the rest of the globe and “us” being the US. Trump is a serial grifter as well as being a projector of his own vices so it makes sense that he sees trade as a zero-sum rather than expansive process, with winners and losers rather than partners. So, in early April, against the advice of almost every reputable economist, and every historian with the slightest acquaintance with the effects of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of the 1930s (hint, they contributed greatly to the Great Depression), he instituted an incoherent strategy that wiped out trillions in wealth as he single-handedly tanked stock markets around the world. Trump and his sycophants justified his actions with multiple and contradictory justifications: the tariffs would be kept in perpetuity, they were a negotiating tool, they would be paid for by other countries, they would be a short and painful readjustment that Americans would have to live with, they would improve America’s industrial might, they would address the crisis of masculinity by bringing back high-wage working class jobs, the list goes on and shifts every few hours or so.

There’s even a new, vaguely left conspiracy theory that Trump wants to destroy the American economy in order to consolidate power in the ruins, but that seems like too much intellectual work for him to have planned. In my last letter, I warned you not to underestimate Trump as stupid, but I certainly didn’t mean for you or anyone to buy the ridiculous canard that Trump plays three-dimensional chess. He and his administration in its second iteration are driven by traditional right-wing compulsions – lowering taxes on the rich, reducing services for the poor, and making sure women know their place. Add in anti-immigrant populism, anti-trans scapegoating, racist dog whistles and bullhorns, and a fully activated attack on reason and its defenders in science, academia and what remains of the civil service, and you have Trumpism. But to fully understand how it was sustained and grew, you have to understand its dynastic origins.

Trump is the heir to a vicious fortune. The New York Times estimated Donald inherited the contemporary equivalent of four hundred million dollars from his father Fred Trump. The elder Trump was a developer during the post-WWII era when public funds were made available to build the closest that the US ever got to social housing. Fred mastered the dark arts of Gotham development in that period: buy off politicians, grift from public funds, make deals with gangsters, stiff contractors, and rent to as few people of color as you can get away with. Donald the heir added in a gambler’s temperament and showy style to his father’s stolid villainy. But, of course, inveterate gamblers lose and when they do, they lose big.

Those of us who have been watching Donald for decades wondered how people could vote for a person who has gone through six bankruptcies and who couldn’t even make money in the casino business, but we underestimated how television recast this failson as the business hero of his own imagination. See the fin-de-siècle trilogy he didn’t write (of course an ADHD-addled heir needed ghost-writers) but that bears his name — Trump: The Art of the Deal (1987); Trump: Surviving at the Top (1990); and Trump: The Art of the Comeback (1997) — which traces his (imaginary) parabolic career. These books were bestsellers, and inspired T.V. producer Mark Burnett to build a reality competition show around him which Burnett called The Apprentice, which bailed Trump out of his post-casino financial crisis.

There is a subset of gamblers that have enough backing to survive their inner demons and outer losing streaks, and Trump during his political career certainly falls into that category. His return to the tables leaves both the country and the world exposed to Trump’s only driving force right now, which is to wreak revenge on his enemies and continue to accrue as much power as possible, if only to be able to humiliate any and all who do not join his cult. For just shy of a hundred days, his luck has held, but as the American poet Bret Harte wrote, “The only sure thing about luck is that it will change.” All of this leaves me fearing for the future, not only because of what Trump controls, but even more so because of what he doesn’t.

When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7^th, 2023 they were able to succeed because by October 6^th, the Israeli intelligence services, like the security forces and the judiciary, had been locked in conflict with Benjamin Netanyahu, a leader who had to stay in power to stay out of jail. Economists speak of October 29^th, 1929 as Black Tuesday, the start of the bear market that led to the Great Depression, but Monday, October 28^th was like any other day in the Roaring ‘20s, with unregulated markets and endless speculation. On the 27^th of June 1914, the multicultural Austro-Hungarian milieu Joseph Roth wrote of in The Radetzky March seemed impregnable. The next day, Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, and that ended not only the Archduke’s life but also the society Roth evoked so carefully. As for the world war, Roth wrote it “could clearly be seen coming, as one might see a storm brewing over the edge of a city, while its streets are still basking innocently under a cloudless sky.”

The brilliant Roth was a nostalgist and melancholic, and I hope I am neither, but as I watch the United States abandon its allies, insult its friends, and feast on its seed corn, what most worries me is that we are somehow in an extended day before. The luck cannot hold, and the sheer meanness of it all makes the solidarity to resist that much harder to generate. That the day before keeps recurring, doesn’t imply that the day after won’t finally arrive, and that’s what scares me.

Yours—

Peter

—

Peter Lunenfeld lives in California. His most recent book is City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Reimagined. He is a professor the Design Media Arts department at UCLA. His first letter from March 24, 2025 can be found here).

Socialism with hyperreal characteristics. The traditional urban-rural dichotomy is disrupted by a four-decade modernisation speedrun. Custom Doraemon Tesla parked up beside caged chickens. Temporal collapse. Cousin purchases cucumber lays with Weixin’s biometric palm scanning after haggling with elderly farmers for produce by the roadside. IP is rendered obsolete. Chinese aunties sporting Kuromi x Balenciaga pyjamas stroll by the river. Culture is stripped from context. This process is only accelerated by the geolocked internet. Everything is appropriated, remixed. Everything is predicated on speed: manufacturing, livestreaming, trends, people. Everything everywhere all at once.  

• Written in my notes app in Zhuzhou, China after falling sick with a fever whilst visiting my grandmother.
  

Simulacrum and Sino-futurism

AI gorilla sofas, car headlight eyelashes, horse heels, Peter Griffin chin mousepads. Pastiche, cryptic and surreal products run rife on the domestic, Chinese, shopping platform Taobao (more widely known by its international counterpart Aliexpress). The pandemonium of manufacturing assemblages sees mass production churn out and transform bizarre, AI-generated ideas (literal and figurative) into reality. ‘The aesthetic of Sinofuturism combines gloss with grime’. While it is often conflated with contemporary China, Lawrence Lek proposes Sinofuturism as a form of Artificial Intelligence, one that is: ‘addicted to learning massive amounts of raw data’ with an ‘unprecedented sense of collective will to power’. Just as the unknowable consciousness of the Artificial Other poses a threat to humanity, the Orientalist Other instils fear into the western subject by its alleged unknowability.

This techno-orientalist stereotype is particularly pertinent after the AI arms race’s latest DeepSeek saga. Through machine learning and ‘copying rather than originality’, Sinofuturism partakes in a Yellow Techno-Peril to overcome inconsistent distinctions between China’s ancient past and its contemporary modernisation. Almost a decade after Lek’s proposition and two decades after China’s ascension to the WTO, this geopolitical and techno-cultural aesthetic has only further proliferated in its factories and manufacturing hubs. Functioning like a large neural network, these structures devour vast quantities of global production processes, transfiguring their morphologies into slop-like, hallucinogenic innovations. Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined. If Artificial Intelligence and Deepfakes produce infinite digital timelines, then Chinese manufacturing manifests these into infinite physical realities. If you can conceive it, you can make it. One AI Gorilla Sofa please .

“Copy everything. Respect for historical tradition is a main principle of Chinese aesthetics. Replicating old masters, memorising old texts, following moral standards, are all part of this tradition. But Sinofuturism absorbs everything. Nothing is sacred. Authorship is overrated. Copyright is wrong.” 

• Lawrence Lek, video essay ‘Sinofuturism’

The notion of China as a site of extreme copy and counterfeit culture reveals a racialised trepidation harkening back to the days of Yellow Peril. Daniel F. Vukovich argues that this sinological form of orientalism is rooted in a project fear of Chinese mimicry threatening the dominance of western hegemony. Homi Bhabha’s mimicry with sinic characteristics. One scroll on reels or TikTok will reveal a collective anxiety of Xi aura-farming on the agricultural fields of Huawei and BYD. This point is shared by Laikwan Pang, who relates the logic of the counterfeit to the logic of capitalism. In the article China Who Makes and Fakes, Pang notes that a pirated product has the unique semiotics of a magical (pre-modern) and self-reproducible simulacrum (post-modern) object. The ‘aura’ that Walter Benjamin coined, or otherworldly, abstract power (as Marx postulated) granted to luxury goods is destroyed by the replica or counterfeit. The IP rights regime and commodity fetishism and its application of ‘authenticity’ or social logics to these objects is questioned. Counterfeit LVMH and Kering handbags are frequently manufactured using the same designs, materials and labour as their authentic counterparts and sometimes even within the same factories. Balenciaga Pandabuy Warriors exist as an extreme manifestation of commodity obsession, fully displaying the performative promise of reaching the ultimate signified.

The dichotomisation of creation and the copy, one which ‘reifies creativity and condemns mimesis’ is an outdated modernist framework that sees creativity as abstractly new. In our hyper-referential world, mimicry and derivative labour is the dominant form of cultural production. Online, witnessing the dissemination of Lao Gan Ma memes and drill beats sampling ‘Red Sun in the Sky’ unveils this flux of semiotic drifts. Appropriation is diminished as unimaginative, but industrialised creativity is a function of replication, a contention that Adorno has analysed extensively. Likewise, China innovates through an industrial piracy where production becomes an iterative, collective process rather than a system of individual authorship. This concept, named ‘Shanzhai’, sees iterative evolutions of commodities become a form of continuous industrial mutation. Bootleg Shanzhai iPhones from the early 2000s pioneered dual sim slots before Samsung or Apple. Many contained eccentricities to the extent that seeing Shanzhai iPhones accommodating electric razors or watches was not an uncommon sight. This haphazard, mishmash of concepts and components is reflected in a distinctly Chinese landscape of cultural production. Life in China today unfolds with a lucidity, and a dreamlike strangeness, exacerbated by the velocity of technological shifts. Anything and everything feel possible; I consume osmanthus cream cheese explosion lava lattes by day and go raving to the pulses of a Chongqing temple club by night.

The China-verse and Non-linear Temporality

While living in China, I have attempted to articulate this feeling of entering alternate timelines and riding the currents of temporal shifts, a prevalent attitude shared by our digital cultural milieu. Under Douyin content farming livestreams that have crossed the deterritorialized internet, a feeling of ‘watching interdimensional cable’ is professed. Under the lustrous and oversaturated cyberpunk edits of Chongqing or Shanghai, some ask: ‘is this AI?’. Others declare that ‘China is the future’. Gabriele de Seta, in the article Sinofuturism as Inverse Orientalism explicates this phenomenon:

“It posits some sort of equivalence between China and the future: China is the future, China comes from the future, the future will come from China, and so on.”

Many diasporic Chinese people, like me, are familiar with a pressure to improve their Mandarin skills, because it might aid our careers sometime in the future. Likewise, Sinofuturism implicates a future-oriented temporality. These speculative imaginaries have roots in the writings of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) around the turn of the Millenium. Notably, in 1994, the esoteric accelerationist turned right-wing grifter Nick Land, who now resides in China, proclaimed that ‘Neo-China arrives from the future’. Likewise, the less meth-pilled Sadie Plant wrote of an Asian convergence of ‘bamboo mats’ with the ‘manufacture of computer games’ in the collapse of modernity. However, de Seta posits the problematic nature of this cyber-exotic techno-orientalist discourse. Namely, the denial of ‘coevalness’ or the assumption of a colonial linear temporality.

These futurist temporal positionalities of China have a ‘shizogenic use of time’, an anthropological framework that is predicated on a temporal distancing of the Other. De Seta contends that it is precisely this ‘denial of coevalness’ that Sinofuturism partakes of, whereby China is temporally bounded to other timelines. This notion is contingent on a western conception of temporality that views history as linear and time as a continuity divided into discrete instants. Philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s Infancy and History interrogates this concept:

 ‘Western man’s incapacity to master time, and his consequent obsession with gaining and passing it, have their origins in this Greek concept of time as quantified and infinite continuum of precise fleeting instants. A culture with such a representation of time could have no real experience of historicity.’

 Other ethnofuturisms, such as Afrofuturism, understand that upending hegemonic and colonial frameworks must come from counternarratives that emanate from the periphery of western time. Categories of blackness and Otherness produced under enlightenment philosophy serve to maintain a separation from historicity, as Denise Ferreira da Silva argues, it ‘transubstantiates juridico-economic effect into a moral defect’ by constantly reproducing categories of being, sameness and difference that consistently place blackness outside of the development of history. Thus, it is imperative to seek emancipation outside these categories of being, such as the Kantian subject and Hegel’s racial others that are reproduced by the framework of time. Therefore, this necessitates the rejection of the colonial linear trajectory of time, rather than be conjured as part of techno-orientalist fantasy.

Rather than placing China in the futurity of a linear, chronological timeline, we can understand it to have a field-like quality, one that Agamben frames as charged, suspended and transformative. Chinese cultural and technological production shows that ‘there is nothing radically new; we can see history as an enormous process of mimesis’. Pang notes how this notion of time as fluid and circular is evidenced in the traditional Chinese calendar and even in the narrative structure of Chinese novels. These reject chronological succession, seeing time as non-linear and simultaneous. History is absorbed and futures are pre-empted. “It makes no sense to produce visions of the future. It’s already here”.

———–

Sinofuturism. Available at: https://sinofuturism.com/.

Agamben, G. and Heron, L. (2020) Infancy and history: On the destruction of experience. S.l.: Verso.

Da Silva, D.F. (2014) ‘Toward a black feminist poethics’, The Black Scholar, 44(2), pp. 81–97. doi:10.1080/00064246.2014.11413690.

de Seta , G. (2020) ‘Sinofuturism as Inverse Orientalism: China’s Future and the Denial of Coevalness’, SFRA Review , 50(2–3). Available at: https://sfrareview.org/2020/09/04/50-2-a5deseta/.

Dirlik, A. (1996) ‘Chinese history and the question of orientalism’, History and Theory, 35(4), p. 96. doi:10.2307/2505446.

Pang, L. (2008) ‘`China who makes and fakes’’, Theory, Culture & Society, 25(6), pp. 117–140. doi:10.1177/0263276408095547.

———–

Lina Deng is a London-based British-Chinese interdisciplinary artist. Her experimental approach moves fluidly between performance, new media, sculpture, and theory-inflected research. She’s deeply invested in how the internet shapes consciousness through digital absurdities, algorithmic pastiche and the attention economy. Loitering through our ever-evolving, schizophrenic digital landscape, she interpolates the psychic-ontological shift brought about by content collapse and the spiritual residues of spectral ecologies.

I

As a ’90s kid, I remember too well us school kids singing and dancing to the songs at the top of the charts on music shows such as Ingigayo (인기가요) and Music Bank (뮤직뱅크). It was what one might call the “pre-K-pop” era: there were a lot of solo artists performing in various genres, and the notion of idol culture as we know it now was only fledgling. Without the mass production system or the global distribution that has come to be the norm in today’s K-pop, first generation idol groups around the new millennium—H.O.T., Fin.K.L, god, Sechs Kies, S.E.S.—not only set up these business models and standards, but also inspired the music and aesthetics of later generations. The group aespa’s cover of “Dreams Come True” by S.E.S. is an exemplar case, and NewJeans, with their unflinching Y2K aesthetics and sound, take us back to the millennial through and through.

What are we to make of this return? I wonder if the return of the millennial across South Korea’s cultural sectors has to do with the old, daunting problem of capitalism. The kids born in the ‘90s are now adults with buying power, and nostalgia always sells. It’s by no means new to ask this, but still: are we at a cultural impasse where we cannot tell—and sell, for that matter—genuinely brand-new stories? What “genuinely brand-new” means is also another question. 

Interestingly, though, it is also about aesthetics. The millennial aesthetic is not just a trope that is old, marketable, and familiar to a consumer base; it was always something inherently futuristic. The K-pop scene around the millennial was abundant with references to cyberworld and AI, keeping pace with the emerging and developing presence of the Internet. The group CLON immediately comes to mind: named after the term clone, the group was performing futurist visuals and electronic techno sound and dance throughout the early 2000s. If our contemporary culture and music scene is bringing back this specific aesthetic of the past, this is then already always a look toward the future—that is, by reviving the old that was all about the future yet to come, we also, in the now, desire a new future. It is the very mode of thinking or imagination that also travels with the return of the millennial as a product.

K-pop today has been witnessing new generations of bands that showcase futurist visuals and sound such as EXO and aespa. Now, despite these well-produced and -invested bands–and the whole industry wired toward mass production and profit-making–I want to direct us to another scenario where this neo-millennial touch is much more than simply the most up-to-date upgrade for the old and familiar financial success plot. By way of what I might call comparative listening, I ask that we attune ourselves to how sound not only travels across time and space but propels us to look toward the future that has not yet come. To this end, I begin with a story of a cultural phenomenon in the early K-pop scene: long before K-pop became a global sensation, a young former-actress Lee Jung Hyun was offering her listeners a flight through sounds that deterritorialize and relocate them onto a different spatiotemporal plane.

II

Amidst the early idol wars of the millennial that came to define K-pop as we now know it, we also saw and heard something unprecedented. We were certainly not ready when a 19-year-old female singer made her debut on a major ground wave television music show on the last day of October 1999. On this day, Ingigayo, a now defunct weekly Sunday live music program, aired Lee’s first performance of “Wa” (와) which was an instant sensation across the country. It starts with a camera zooming in on an extraterrestrial planet with a ring around it that says, “LEE JUNG HYUN Let’s Go To My Star.” Accompanying this visual cue is the likewise out-of-this-planet sound effect that instantly transports the audience to her “Star,” wherever that might exactly be.

After setting up the otherworldly soundscape, Lee begins to introduce herself, except that, aside from occasional decodable words—“zero,” “Korea,” “Jung Hyun,” etc.—the introduction falls short: we cannot really hear what she is saying or, more to the point, meaning. It is here, at the point of “zero,” ungrounded on our planet Earth and distant from any system of meaning at hand, that Lee sends out the invitation to her own planet and embarks on her almost ritual-like performance with such full force, showing the audience that this sound and these dance moves of hers are the very power source of the not-yet visible spaceship. (Cue the windy stage effect!)

Lee’s memorable entrance to the scene was almost instantly followed by both financial success and cultural impact. Right after her performance aired, Lee began to win every competition on every major music show; she showcased her repertoire with variations, although keeping with her futuristic, spacey visuals and sound. Everyone from elementary school kids to celebrities on TV imitated Lee’s pinky mic and her gargantuan, “big eyed” fan, not to mention her unique techno dance moves. It was as if Lee’s debut statement—“Let’s Go To My Star,” also the title of her first album—came to realize itself by, quite literally, transporting the people of earth to her star, where different aesthetics and politics apply. The visual and aural shock of Lee’s strong experimentalism shifted and transformed the cultural terrain of the Korean pop music scene, taking the viewers and listeners to possibilities and futures that had no name yet.

Can this be a starting point where we can imagine futures yet to be charted? It is no secret that this futurist aesthetic introduced at the turn of the century is even more widely visible and audible in K-pop today. EXO, for instance, owes its group name to exoplanet, and as their story goes, members are extraterrestrial beings that came to planet Earth, without any memory or the superpowers they once had off-planet. Or, we could look to aespa: like EXO, their narrative takes us deep into a future where members in the “real” world encounter and connect with their avatars (called “ae”) in the “virtual” world. 

Throughout these cases, the futurism of the millennial that Lee pioneered seems to be calling to us once again, only to be reinforced in and through the new market that has been expanding larger than ever. Again, capitalism and the laws of the market seem to be victorious. But how did Lee do it in the first place—where did she find her inspiration? When there was hardly any precedent of the systemized or mass-produced storytelling that has now come to be the norm of the K-pop industry, Lee was single handedly telling a story that no one in the K-pop history would have easily come up with, and sound was the very centerpiece. 

As many of Lee’s contemporary commentators pointed out, her music combines then-emerging techno rhythm and sound with Korean traditional music; her mixes feature thumping beats accompanied by traditional instruments like ajaeng (in “Wa”) and kkwaenggwari (in “GX 339-4,” often performed live as an intro to “Wa”) that delivered historically and culturally readily available sounds to the South Korean audience. This surprising, genre-bending mix of musical and sonic repertoires left many listeners unsure whether her music was of the past or future. Lee further added to this hybridity by overdubbing the fast-paced techno rhythm with slow dance moves inspired by tai chi, as she revealed in her interview with Section TV. In another interview with the national evening paper Munhwa Ilbo (문화일보), Lee said that she found techno in Europe four years ago and that it was now widely spread across Europe and the United States. She added that, when she was recording the album, techno was just being introduced to South Korea, and that she wanted to popularize the genre further by making the title song more accessible. 

This was the origin story of “Wa”: as one of the earliest exponents of techno in the K-pop scene in the 90s, Lee needed more familiar components—lyrics about love and betrayal, traditional instruments, etc.—to ease the audience into the new technological sound. And it is sound that connects all these nodes of Lee’s story. It was the fusion of Korean traditional music and European techno that allowed Lee to open up a whole new terrain of music that no one had heard of. In other words, it is as if sound allowed Lee to travel time and space, crossing and crisscrossing different genres of different periods and places through music. It is useful to go back to the latter interview, where we can glimpse her exposure to a wide-ranging repertoire of international music traditions:

I enjoy listening to various kinds of music like Indian, Cuban rock, Eastern European, and African, but these genres remain inaccessible to many domestic listeners. Dedicated music fans might be able to access them by downloading files from the internet or something, but the ninety percent of people cannot. That’s the reality of our country. 

It was these sonic crossings between different eras and parts of the world that inspired Lee not only to produce and introduce new sounds to the domestic scene, but, in and through those sounds, to herald the very future of K-pop. When there was barely any systemic approach to music production or any music streaming service in existence like Spotify or even YouTube—MTV was the closest thing we had—Lee was embodying the force of sound itself to cross times and spaces and present something totally new, taking all of us to her star.

III

Lee’s story of sound as an interstellar force to cross temporal and spatial boundaries sends us not only to today’s K-pop but, rather unexpectedly, to midcentury America, where K-pop as such could not have been known. Lee’s florid, even lurid, out-of-this-world attire and futuristic electronic sound reference a notoriously occult figure of the mid-20th century American music scene: Sun Ra.

Jazz composer/pianist, leader of the independent record label/space travel agency El Saturn, the myth incarnation and many more, Ra claims to have come from outer space to bring all the Black people on earth back to where he came from through his music—where, as he says in the film Space is the Place, “sounds of guns, anger, frustration” of earth are no more. In a 1968 prose “My Music Is Words,” Ra writes:

To me all types of music are music but all types of music are not Space Music. According to my weigh of things: Space music is an introductory prelude to the sound of greater infinity. It is not a new thing project to me, as this kind of music is my natural being and presentation. It is a different order of sounds synchronized to the different order of Being.

On another occasion, Ra said of his space music that “the vibrations of it will just put them over in the sound and the sound becomes like a spaceship and lift ’em on out there.” This self-claimed rescue mission through new music and its “sound of greater infinity” was not merely a pretentious rhetoric or gesture. Ra was one of the earliest exponents of the portable electronic synthesizer Minimoog. Initially trained as a jazz pianist and having played in the big band tradition with jazz giants like Fletcher Henderson, Ra turned to what may be called “space sound engineering” to introduce space travel through otherworldly sounds.

As many scholars agree, Ra is considered one of the initiators of Afrofuturism. While the term itself was coined by Mark Dery in the 1990s, Afrofuturism describes a pre-existing, distinctive aesthetic style and politics of a group of work by artists—Samuel R. Delany, Octavia E. Butler, Tricia Rose, among others—who imagine and secure Black life and presence in a future where robots, cyborgs, and superhumans can be imagined without difficulty. Dery describes Afrofuturism’s core feature as “speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture—and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future.” This “African-American signification” onto the future carried urgency because this future was, at least before Afrofuturists arrived, mostly white. Dery further asks, “Isn’t the unreal estate of the future already owned by the technocrats, futurologists, streamliners, and set designers—white to a man—who have engineered our collective fantasies?” 

Grappling with this white-oriented future scheme and the contemporary narrative of “progress and conquer” under the headings of the official government space project and the expansion of suburbs, Ra offered an alternative space project: we’re leaving this planet earth behind and turning toward somewhere we can build a different future, and this will be done through new music, new sound: “Space Music.” Indeed, sound has long been a crucial theme and tool for black aesthetics and politics. Black studies scholars—Fred Moten, Alexander Weheliye, Louis Chude-Sokei, Tsitsi Jaji, andré carrington, Daphne Brooks, Anthony Reed, Carter Mathes, Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, Tao Leigh Goffe, Matthew D. Morrison and more—take up Black sound (and often its relationship with technology) to discuss alternative stories of American racial history and future fraught with tensions, but not without hope (one of Afrofuturism’s main themes). Even long before this, though, Black artists had been engaging sound as power, from work song and holler to Blues and Jazz to Hip Hop and dance. Janelle Monáe immediately comes to mind as a contemporary figure who blends this sonic legacy with Afrofuturist features. She even directly comments on Ra’s precedent by conjuring up again his mirror-faced, black-hooded companion in Space is the Place in her own music video, “Tightrope.”

I’m by no means in a hurry to draw a line of influence or causal relationship between Lee and Ra. In fact, I’m not interested in saying that Lee somehow found this long tradition of Black sound and futurist aesthetics and “applied” or even “developed” it for her own use. Rather than setting up some sort of a kinship between Lee and Afrofuturists that may even remotely come across as appropriative, I’m much more interested in thinking, by way of juxtaposition, about whether it is possible to imagine Asian futurism informed and shaped not only by Afrofuturism but by K-pop. Ever since Dery’s inaugural coinage of the term, Afrofuturism has long been recognized for its versatility as a powerful concept to generate other kinds of futurity or futurism. For example, in his chapter for The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction, De Witt Kilgore writes that “Afrofuturism can be viewed within this more general political and aesthetic project, imbricating the experiences of the African diaspora with those of colonized peoples in Asia, South America, and elsewhere” (570). Dawn Chan confirms this root of Asian futurism and ponders upon its possibility, inspired by Ryan Lee Wong: “If Afrofuturist thinkers have created speculative realms of their own accord, carving out counterfactual worlds that might cast the shortcomings of our current one in high relief, might there be analogous ways for Asian artists to recast techno-clichéd trappings toward more generative ends?”

Despite all these ongoing discussions and questions, Asian futurism to this day remains significantly under-developed and -theorized. Further developing such a concept, not to mention its larger and broader—louder—cultural significances, seems to be in order, especially in light of the recent surge in successful renditions of the Asian future-scape as in A24 films like After Yang (2021) and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). So, how do we do this? My modest proposal would be that we listen; that we attune and thus open ourselves to the sound’s power to travel far and wide. 

This is not about finding quintessentially “Asian” sound, as techno-orientalism might have us do; it is rather about recognizing sound and music as an aggregate of energies that transports you to different spaces and times—to myriad possibilities and futures yet to be charted. Famously, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari say as much when they comment on sound’s reterritorializing force: “sound invades us, impels us, drags us, transpierces us. It takes leave of the earth, as much in order to drop us into a black hole as to open us up to a cosmos. . . . . Since its force of deterritorialization is the strongest, it also effects the most massive of reterritorializations” (348). Taking sound’s reterritorializing nature up in the study of popular music, Josh Kun talks of Audiotopia, “music’s utopian potential, its ability to show us how to move toward something better and transform the world we find ourselves in” (17). Sound and the sound of music, as it were, move us beyond the confines of our present world and toward futurity.

It is, then, precisely the very difficulty of identifying an aesthetic and/or political genealogy between Lee and Ra that propels us toward a new futurism. The seemingly random parallel across time and space between the two artists makes more sense now—it confirms, if not strengthens, the mobilizing force of sound to travel far and wide—cross-culturally, cross-historically across eras, periods, nations, continents. Lee’s and Ra’s very taking up of popular music and its sound for their temporally and spatially distant futurist projects attests to this sonic force and, with it, the possibility of sonic world-building that, through its mobile energy, transports the listener somewhere not here and now. 

In The Woman Warrior, whose title I borrow for this essay’s, Maxine Hong Kingston ponders upon her leaving home for America. In this moment of mixed regret and nostalgia, Kingston also learns to see things and the world more clearly: “Be careful what you say. It comes true. It comes true. I had to leave home in order to see the world logically, logic the new way of seeing. I learned to think that mysteries are for explanation. I enjoy the simplicity.” Relocation is never easy, but it also brings, along with shocks and traumas, new perspectives and understandings. Kingston talks of “the new way of seeing,” but can it also be of listening? Is it a pure coincidence that this passage appears in the chapter titled “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe”? If we can let our ears channel the invisible sounds of the world(s) alongside what we see, leaving or relocation may, at once and any moment, become reterritorialization. 

In this way, sound calls for comparative approaches that extend from one culture and history to another, and asks for comparative work, both critical and creative, that welcomes sound as a hearing aid with which to listen to the world(s), both known and unknown. If, as sounders and soundees alike, we are lifted and opened up by sound and reterritorialized elsewhere, it only makes sense to look and listen away from where we already are or what we already know, and towards learning what other worlds and other-worlds might teach us.  Let the sound open us, let ourselves sound out what we learn, then may we be able to finally begin to find courage for another beginning, another future.

—

Featured Image: Lee Jung-Hyun (cover) on 2000’s STAR BOX “asian futurism” music video box set. via flickr

—

Hoon Lee is a PhD candidate in English and Associate Instructor at Indiana University Bloomington. His focus is contemporary American poetry, poetry and institution, lyric theory, popular music, and sound studies. He is specifically interested in how poetry disrupts institutionality by creating spatial and temporal alterity, offering us alternative forms of living and future survival. He holds a BA in English Education and an MA in English Literature from Seoul National University, South Korea.

—

REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
On Donuts, Sandwiches and Beattapes: Listening for J Dilla Six Years On–DJ Primus Luta

Sonic Contact Zones: An Interview with DJs MALT and Eat Paint in Koreatown, Los Angeles—Shawn Higgins

Afrofuturism, Public Enemy, and Fear of a Black Planet at 25–andré carrington