Some videos you needed to see

Tonight, I set my research parameters to "visually interesting garbage," fell into Vimeo, and came out with these. My publication of these videos in list format is not endorsement or disparagement of any particular band, artist, religion, food item, livestock rearing technique, or drug. Actual plot lines may vary.

Alagoas “Ghosts” / Music Video

Highly-effective appropriation of native american images and rituals for the exaltation of  blindingly white aspiration-core indie rock. A witch drinks some drugs and has a vision, thereafter pulls a fungus elemental out of a portal and dances joyously with it. The spirit's rainbow spores infect the whole tribe, resulting in eventual genocide I'm guessing.

Synesthesia

Live action sitcom starring an old general, a lonely housewife, and their boring sons. Cats start jumping out of the stereo and the children poke at vegetables and porkchops with 6.35 mm headphone plugs. Then the stereo explodes.

“Batongo- La notte Dei Tempi”

Man spends a lonely Saturday night putting on an art show for no one and records it on a vintage super 8 camera. Intercut with flash-forward scenes of him partying at a nightclub, having made millions with his high effort, low quality art memes. Presumably he gets laid.

The Shoes Ft. Dominic Lord - 1960’s Horror

Animal rights fever dream. First, the cruelties industrial chicken farming are demonstrated in gory detail. Then, the products then seize the means of production, and giant roosters destroy several major landmarks. A skeezy hipster is filmed humping poultry. Dope rhymes, too. 

Ancestor by Matt Sheean and Malachi Ward

Here’s a drink you can make to best enjoy Ancestor, which was released today in trade paperback by Image Comics. Take one Philip K. Dick and one Alejandro Jodorowsky (circa The Holy Mountain) and throw them in a cocktail glass with two blackberries and a splash of agave nectar. Muddle. Add two shots of blanco tequila, two drops of Dimethyltryptamine or Lysergic Acid, and give it a dash of Black Mirror. Mix, shake, and serve. Now take your drink to a dark corner of your room, far from your computer or any wi-fi enabled devices. Read and drink slowly.  Short as it is, Ancestor is a trip for the mind that’s worth your time.

Ancestor is a loaded slice of psychedelic philosophy, written by Matt Sheean and pictorialized by Malachi Ward. Set in a non-specified time in a non-specified corner of the United States, it’s the story of a well-meaning lunatic genius who upgrades a social media platform / body enhancement service into a hybrid, post-human being that changes the course of entire human race. Its narrative swerves are buttressed by knods to the philosophical anxieties that we, as a society of “enhanced” interconnected technologies, are slowly coming to know.

Surrender your autonomy to the service
and make her the perfect cocktail!

The plot’s lunatic genius, Patrick Whiteside, is an outwardly kind, curly haired tech billionaire who's tendency to turn conversations into one-sided motivational pep talks betrays his maniacal desire to control and reform everyone he comes across. Whiteside was a co-developer of “the service.” The service is what personal computing will be like once we're able to inject the internet into our blood streams and tether it directly to our mental and bodily functions. It’s more or less augmented consciousness, an artificially intelligent Siri for your mind, that goes with you everywhere. The service can float social media and web content in your face on levitating yellow jelly screens, instantly identifying friends and strangers and objects. It can also talk you down from a panic attack if you’re going nuts. When talking doesn’t work, the service can, at your behest, administer a calculated dose of whatever medication you need to to get on the wagon again, then monitor your vital signs until you’re copacetic. On good nights, it can take control of your body (after you grant it permission to access your motor skills), which it can then use to make a perfectly mixed cocktail of your choice for whatever platinum blonde art femme you're hitting on. The service is the ultimate integrated web experience.

Whiteside talks it out

Like us and our hyper-connected devices, people in the world of Ancestor can become so inured to the service that they experience varying degrees of anxiety when disconnected from it. While the service enables superhuman abilities, it's also a nuisance to immediate experience. Whether you want it or not, the service will tell you everything it thinks you need to know.

Ancestor’s main character, Peter, is not sure how he feels about this intense connectivity. Though he relies on the service to get a grip on his anxiety disorder, he’s often a victim of the incessant suggestions of it’s yellow jelly screens. As troubled as he is by all this, it’s apparent that he is a brilliant and pensive man who is simply trying to life his live free of anxiety, and sees the service as a tool to that end. Peter is invited to an impromptu party hosted by Whiteside in his billionaire mansion in the middle of nowhere. There, he’s made to participate in the beta-testing of Whiteside’s magnificent new invention, his Service 2.0. Peter, Whiteside, and the rest of the world are then forcefully thrust into unknown territory, as Whiteside loses control of his new product. From there on out, things get incredibly strange and wonderful.

Whiteside is like a cross between Goethe's Faust and Ozymandias from Watchmen, placed in the body of a creepy child-therapist or hypnotist. In him we see the expression of a utopian ethos prevalent in Silicon Valley. This ethos, “California Ideology,” preaches that a blend of technological innovation and bold individual action will eventually solve all of humanity's problems. But as the story progresses, Peter grows to resist Whiteside's manipulations and psychological games, and resents the implication that he needs either a guru or a some post-human bio-integrated bloatware to give him peace of mind. By the end of their "relationship," it's Peter, not Whiteside or the human race, who finds something resembling inner peace.

We all know by now the mythology of the tech boom. Scientists and ex-hippies, with the help of massive private and public investment, invented the personal computer, the internet, the iPhone, the Google. The digital backbone of information technology was highly influenced by a bourgeois subset of the 1960’s counter culture. This counter culture failed to liberate human consciousness from its societal captors. Having failed, those with the knowledge and the inclination began to look towards technology and capitalism as humanity’s only hope. A large part of the advertising for contemporary technology and software displays a remnant of that failed hope for technological liberation and omnipotence, the hope that “existing social, political and legal power structures will wither away to be replaced by unfettered interactions between autonomous individuals [or businesses] and their software.”

In response to the Silicon Valley messiahs preaching salvation, peace, and money through tech-gnosis, Ancestor offers an almost satirical counter narrative. It expresses a healthy distrust towards anyone who claims to have all the answers, be they human or otherwise. Malachi Ward and Matt Sheean’s story is an expression of the desire to not be told who you are or what you need to do with your life. It also asks whether or not we should sacrifice genuine unmediated experiences (and the commensurate euphoria and excitement that comes of sometimes not-knowing) for the sake of complete control and self-determination.

If Ancestor has one failing it’s that it’s way too short. While readers will get a conclusion that satisfies the arc, there’s 15 billion years worth of plot missing that I wish they had gotten into. By the end, I found myself wanting to hear more about the how and why of it, to see more of Matt and Malachai’s bizarre alternate reality. It’s such a tease. Maybe the comic book gods will see fit to provide mankind with a spin-off? It’s pretty great for what it is though - a self contained thought experiment with poetic conceits and beautiful art.

I would recommend also checking out this short comic by Ancestor's creators regarding "the process" of making Ancestor a reality.

Nietzschean Mutations by Dromsjel

"Drømsjel" means “dream soul” in Norwegian. It’s the moniker of Pierre Schmidt, a German born digital artist who takes the vintage 1940s and 50s advertising aesthetic to heady and surrealist place. Dromsjel fucking loves to rip people's faces off.  Then he replaces them with wild flora and fauna: flowers, lichens, fungi, parakeets.  The faces are straight from magazine advertisements, but the wildlife illustrations are encyclopedic, scientific illustrations. He melts it all together using a mixture of collage, illustrations and digital blending. His website claims his work is “partly inspired by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who challenged ideas about individuality and the meaning of our existence”.

Dromsjel has been kind enough to provide us with before and after images of his modifications, walking us through the face ripping process. 

Why does Dromsjel hate makeup so much? Why is a rainbow waterfall on this lady's face so much better than Revlon's revolutionary "demi-textures"? I feel like it would help to look into Dromsjel's purported influence to figure it out. I need a quote, but I'm not a Nietzsche scholar, so... 

“Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.”

Thanks Wikiquote.com, that'll do fine. 

Advertisers are mathematicians of desire, calculating images with the perfect ratio of beauty and mass appeal. The subjects are ideal, especially in all the older magazine ads. Scientific illustrations, likewise, want to get as close to an ideal form as possible, that which was provided by nature upon observation. But nature hates a straight line, like our buddy Nietzsche knows. Maybe that's why it sometimes feels like a perfect thing is begging to be broken, just because it's so perfect. Think of cute aggression, those kittens and puppies so cute it that internally they make you want to bash something against a wall. I think Dromsjel can relate. In his images recognizable perfection has been invaded and reshaped by a contagous hyperactivity. He saw this perfectly illustrated parakeet and this hip young couple on their motor bike, and he thought "FFFFUCK SOMEONE NEEDS THEIR FACE RIPPED RIGHT THE FUCK OFF."

So, there is a sense in which these pictures are utterly violent. They look like awful new creatures from a planet where boundaries have trouble respecting each other. Nietzsche is relevant here too, because Nietzsche loved vitality, and knew that the true power of life was in it's ability to overtake, to grow, to remain vital in the face of mediocrity. These advertisements are begging to be infected with life, because they represent compromise with the masses, with mediocrity. 

You can enact the Drosjel philosophy, as I see it, by going out today or tomorrow (no later, please) and looking at every thing you see, from hottest hottie you see walking down the street, to the pigeons waiting for you to drop crumbs from your sandwich at lunch, to the subway train that's getting ready to take you home -- imagine each thing in existence has a personal agenda as well as the potential to utterly change you and be changed by you. Do not go around stuffing chrysanthemums and finches people's faces. You will be punched. Stay in your head, and imagine how much different you would be by the end of the day, after having had everything you pass try to actively invade you, it's vital energy interacting with and fighting with your own in a day long argument with a multitude of participants, natural and unnatural, sentient and non-sentient. That's the struggle of life that Nietzsche believed in, and that's illustrated in Dromsjel's images. 

You could say that, in these images, consumer culture is being dismantled and re-purposed in order to expose the manipulations of capitalism, but there's no need to be such a college socialist about it. He's just creating beauty from dead left over beauty, from artifacts that have no ability to fight back any more. Dromsjel is recycling, re-energizing and building upon images that still have a little vitality left to wring out. These ads, the drained ephemeral left overs of a previous generations' consumer culture, are now historical artifacts, obsolete tools for an old machine. Likewise, the old necessity to illustrate the natural world in order to spread knowledge of it was filled by photography. It's largely a dead art, but an art nonetheless. All that's left of these tools is that flat beauty, which Dromsjel rejuvinates with visual commentary. It doesn't feel like an attack. It feels like a party is breaking out on the surface of these familiar, now cliched figures and fashions. He's like a medium. With his manipulations and alterations, Dromsjel is having a lively visual conversation with the dead.  

 

Even the obsolete has value when it's dismantled, invaded, rearranged. It's how flowers grow, from the rot of what came before. Remember how tenacious life is, how much bigger nature is than you, how it's going to keep fighting against you, and how you need to fight back and not stand there like some jerk off on a moped in an advertisement selling a life that isn't real. The bland need not be bland so long as you're alive to perceive it and ballsy enough to impose your specific weirdness onto it. There's always the excitement of the act of perceiving, and the desire to interact, to let the party going on in your head play with the party going on outside, to perceive actively, without dead time. Why let perfectly good leftovers go to waste?