Valentina Tanni, Silvia Dal Dosso Daydreams, Playable Nightmares and Out-of-Body Journeys PostScript UM #50 Kataložni zapis o publikaciji (CIP) pripravili v Narodni in univerzitetni knjižnici v Ljubljani COBISS.SI-ID 193153027 ISBN 978-961-7173-49-9 (PDF) Valentina Tanni, Silvia Dal Dosso Daydreams, Playable Nightmares and Out-of-Body Journeys “The internet is an alien life form,” declared David Bowie in 1999:1 today, the prophecy has come true, and our digital tools have become magical portals with mys-terious properties, windows into a universe that exists somewhere between dream and reality. Beyond the reflective screens of the devices we carry in our pockets, we have discovered a region haunted by strange presences – sometimes threatening, sometimes surreal, sometimes fascinating, and other times nonsen-sical. These are the same presences that, over the past fifteen years, have shaped the so-called “internet aesthetics”, that ensemble of subcultures, popular narratives, and visual and auditory languages through which the alien entity has finally revealed itself to humanity. The net then reveals itself for what it truly is: a threshold as physical as it is mental, where bizarre things happen, time is warped and we find ourselves inhabiting an intermediate dimension, a territory that is “neither here nor there”. Valentina Tanni’s book Exit Reality 2 is the first attempt to map a world imbued with disorienting hallucinatory qualities, a realm that appears to us as a parallel planet that has emerged from the galaxies of code-space. Start-ing from the advent of vaporwave, which infused the network’s native imagery with spectral properties in the 1 BBC Newsnight. (2016, January 11). David Bowie speaks to Jeremy Paxman on BBC Newsnight (1999) [Video]. Retrieved April 15, 2024, from www.youtube.com/ watch?v=FiK7s_0tGsg 2 Tanni, V. (2023). Exit reality: Vaporwave, backrooms, weirdcore e altri paesaggi oltre la soglia. NERO Editions. VALENTINA TANNI, SILVIA DAL DOSSO early 2010s, the author takes us on a descent through the levels that traverse the silent horror of the backrooms, brushes against the obsession with sensory stimulation of ASMR, touches on the algorithmic surrealism of weirdcore and arrives at the pseudomagical practices such as reality shifting and memetic rituals. All the while, we remain comfortably seated before our screen, inside a bat-tlestation ready to take off for a one-way astral journey, eternally trapped in the liminal space born out of the now inseparable relationship between the visions of the human being and the dreams of the Machine. On the occasion of the release of Exit Reality in English, PostScriptUM presents this conversation between art historian and curator Valentina Tanni and the artist and researcher in web subcultures Silvia Dal Dosso. 4 DAYDREAMS, PLAYABLE NIGHTMARES AND OUT-OF-BODY JOURNEYS SILVIA DAL DOSSO: To the tune of A playlist to feel like you are playing marbles with Einstein, a moment before he discovered the theory of special relativity in 1905, we find ourselves on the blan-ket of space and time, the familiar wireframe that is usually green on black, but sometimes also yellow or, why not, sky blue on purple. Behind us, the planet of vaporwave3 is so massive that it creates a very steep slope, from which we try to escape by hopping here and there, on the thou-sand little satellites that circulate around it: Frutiger Aero aesthetics, Y2K, backrooms,4 dream pools,5 weirdcore, traumacore, anything to keep us from approaching the apocalyptic vortex of corecore6 that imposes itself on our event horizon, eating everything, and that sits unquestion-ingly in front of us, right where we imagined the future should be. That’s kind of how I felt as I read your book Exit Reality, and all those moments in internet history were flowing again in front of my eyes: those things or waves or cores that one day just popped up to remain there forever and are now somehow reacting within our present timeline all at once. A feeling that might haunt us during 3 Vaporwave. (2024). In Aesthetics Wiki. Retrieved April 16, 2024, from aesthetics. fandom.com/wiki/Vaporwave 4 The Backrooms. (2024). In Wikipedia. Retrieved April 16, 2024, from en.wikipedia. org/wiki/The_Backrooms 5 Mensah, M. (2022, September 4). Jared Pike: A Descent into the Dream Pools. Loner. Retrieved April 16, 2024, from www.lonerofficial.com/post/jared-pike-a-descent-into-the-dream-pools 6 For the definition of Frutiger Aero, Y2K, weirdcore, traumacore and corecore aesthetics, see aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Aesthetics_Wiki. 5 VALENTINA TANNI, SILVIA DAL DOSSO this conversation about what you called the “landscapes beyond the threshold”, the places that sprung from the collective digital unconscious of the West, as online multitudes sought to explore or express what was happening to culture, time, art and themselves. On the one hand, one gets the impression, as you tell in the book, that everything was already there, con-centrated in the vaporwave’s primordial soup: nostalgia for the lost paradise, the reassuring climate of widespread wealth of the 1990s, the confidence about a future supported by a friend-ly new technology full of little surprises, amid the “bliss” landscapes and funny assistants of Windows interfaces that ambiguously begins to fail, to sound out of pitch, to show error messages, as we obsessively cling to the palm trees, water bubbles, waterfalls, clouds and neon co-lours of Frutiger Aero, while processing the trauma of all that we have lost as we entered the cursed 2010s. On the other hand, it is prob-ably no coincidence that you found yourself writing this book at the height of a vibe shift that was heralded by eminent internet and trend forecasting figures (such as Angelicism017 and Sean Monahan of the K-HOLE collective8) and is now on everyone’s lips; meanwhile, the economic and cultural system created by social and sharing economy platforms – as we had 7 cashedcobrazhousewriter.substack.com 8 khole.net 6 DAYDREAMS, PLAYABLE NIGHTMARES AND OUT-OF-BODY JOURNEYS known it – seems to have reached its twilight and ended up dragging into the black hole even fundamental pieces of our education and basic knowledge, of our way of relating to the world, to others and thus to ourselves. What happens in the “landscapes beyond the threshold”? Does the temporal dimension that used to define the beginning and end of #cores still exist? And what happened to space? A vaporwave-style graphic, found image. VALENTINA TANNI: When you are in front of a threshold, time stops, in a sense. Indeed, the boundary not only interrupts space, generating the existence of an inside and an outside, but also potentially marks a before and an after. The obsession that net users seem to have with liminal spaces stems precisely from this inseparable relationship between time and space: empty rooms, silent hallways and deserted shopping malls are nothing more than containers of time now emptied. When the threshold is a screen, this space-time node becomes incredibly 7 VALENTINA TANNI, SILVIA DAL DOSSO complex. We inhabit the internet mostly with our minds; as we explore the “landscapes beyond the threshold”, we leave our bodies behind, dealing with tingling sensa-tions and back pain. We perceive the internet as a place (who remembers cyberspace?), but, in fact, our experience when we are connected is incorporeal, dislocated, dispersed. Time, on the other hand, tends to distort and contract, just as happens in all “absorbing” experiences: reading a book, watching a movie … To this we must add another factor, now clear to everyone: the fact that online, we can instantly retrieve any material from the past, from any era or culture, further changes our approach to temporality. As Daniel Lopatin said in a 2009 interview: “So it’s not surprising that a lot of us working in the field of arts during this information science age definitely feel like archivists or anthropologists or time travelers. We’ve literally been equipped with everything we need to informally time travel via the arts and sciences.”9 The internet user today is like this: a bit of an archivist (search, download, organise, save), a bit of an anthropologist (observe the infinitely diverse yet absurdly similar behaviours of millions of people around the world), a bit of a time traveller (go back and forth through history retrieving visual aesthetics, sound worlds, narratives and assorted vibes). I agree with what you say about the specific timing of this book. It is no coincidence that I found myself writing it right at the turn of 2023. The concept of vibe shift 9 Impose Magazine. (n. d.). Daniel Lopatin of Oneohtrix Point Never. Impose Magazine. Retrieved April 16, 2024, from www.imposemagazine.com/features/ daniel-lopatin-of-oneohtrix-poi 8 DAYDREAMS, PLAYABLE NIGHTMARES AND OUT-OF-BODY JOURNEYS is vague and evanescent, but if you think about it, it is itself a vibe. It is the vibe of these years, and that is why we are so drawn to it: the vibe of perpetual change, of uncertainty as an existential condition, of apocalypse as a permanent horizon. We sense, on an almost subliminal level, the imminence of something, but none of us can trace the contours of this change precisely. Even the internet has suddenly become an uncomfortable, strange, difficult place; even for those of us who have been inhabiting it permanently for decades. The symbolic images of this historical moment that moves between distraction and despair are the labyrinths of backrooms, the endless corridors of liminal spaces and the wide-open doors to the deep space of weirdcore and dreamcore. Daydreams, playable nightmares and out-of-body journeys. A weirdcore-style picture. _Ajil_, Come in... , 2021. SDD: While reading Exit Reality, I must con-fess that I experienced an aggressive stream of “autoscopic” moments – no worries, I feel fine. Several times, while in a hammock or on a beach towel, I fell victim to involuntary out-of-body experiences in which you forced me 9 VALENTINA TANNI, SILVIA DAL DOSSO to scan the darkness of my behaviour and that of so many other millennial and Gen Z users. Throughout the book, we realise how – forced to communicate via limited media that do not allow us to hear each other’s breath or look into each other’s eyes – we have evolved a kind of specialisation in “feels”, trying to describe hypercomplex feelings with words (as in John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows you cite), sounds (“A playlist to feel like you etc.”), images (core, aesthetics) and memes (reaction, character). It is easy to see that the arrival of forums and then social media in our lives has had im-measurable consequences, but you also made me notice how this constant sharing leads us to discover deeply hidden parts of our individuality. It is exemplary that a “strange, hard-to-define” feeling like ASMR, never “identified or studied by official science”, as you say, has “in just a few years become a topic of conversation – and often an obsession – for millions of people around the world”. A similar process of discovery causing collective and compulsive sharing is what fomented tulpamancy,10 the art of creating fictional characters; and then – as you recount – reality shifting,11 the spiritual practice of migrating into other fictional reali-10 Tulpamancy. (2022). In Tulpa Wiki. Retrieved April 16, 2024, from tulpa.fandom. com/wiki/Tulpamancy 11 Reality Shifting. (2022). In Rational Wiki. Retrieved April 16, 2024, from rationalwiki.org/wiki/Reality_shifting 10 DAYDREAMS, PLAYABLE NIGHTMARES AND OUT-OF-BODY JOURNEYS ties, whose manuals can be found all over the internet. All these experiences previously had no name, were strictly personal and were rarely spoken about. Until a few years ago, I was very careful not to tell anyone that I get a very pleasant tingling sensation down my spine when a postal worker explains something mildly useful to me, or that until I was thirteen years old, I spent several hours after school staring at the ceiling, shifting into invented worlds in which I was a jungle heroine or the one and only true protagonist of The Truman Show. Millennials like me were silent for a long time, like so many humans before us, until they found themselves online; just as you recount when you talk about poolcore,12 we realised that our experiences were very, all too similar: “in a way, we all went to the same pool”. The thrill of being part of a hivemind that can and does know everything was beautiful; but to find out that so many strangers had lived the same intimate life as us and to realise that the sacred temples in which our individuality was formed were actually the result of seri-al production, globalisation and mass society, disturbed us, made us feel like a non-player character in a cold algorithm. For Gen Z, who somehow always knew that the intimate was shared, the situation is quite different: could it 12 Poolcore. (2024). In Aesthetics Wiki. Retrieved April 16, 2024, from aesthetics. fandom.com/wiki/Poolcore 11 VALENTINA TANNI, SILVIA DAL DOSSO be that today it is easier for them to create art, culture and fictional experiences through collective processes? A typical example of the poolcore aesthetic, found image. VT: This extremely intimate sharing experience you talk about, which the internet allows despite its limitations (the exclusion of the body and physical contact), is in my opinion the most fascinating, and at the same time terrifying, aspect of the internet. In the early 1990s, Pierre Lévy spoke of collective intelligence, envisioning a future in which this continuous global interconnectedness would give birth to a new form of intelligence capable of “augmenting” skills and intellectual resources. This idea has come to fruition, but in unforeseen forms: un-able to select what to share, what kind of ideas to con-vey, what skills to enhance and for what purposes, we have seen brains and souls connect at every level, for any conceivable end and goal, in any conceivable way. Although we keep comparing processors to human brains, our minds are definitely not calculators; sharing human resources is not the same as sharing datasets and computational power. By interconnecting human intelligence, we connect not only expertise and informa-12 DAYDREAMS, PLAYABLE NIGHTMARES AND OUT-OF-BODY JOURNEYS tion but also emotions, feelings, intuitions, obsessions, dreams and visions. This kind of extended hivemind is exactly the “alien life form” that David Bowie talked about in his 1999 interview with the BBC,13 where in a moment of extreme lucidity and prescience he told journalist Jeremy Paxman: “The potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg … I think we’re actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.” As you suggest, the contact with this dynamic certainly has had different consequences in different generations. For Generation X and the millennials, it was a mutation process, at once exhilarating and pain-ful, something we had to process, understand, learn. For Gen Z, I think the awareness of being part of this “whole” was acquired more quickly and instinctively. I cannot say whether this is good or bad, and it is still hard to imagine the consequences. I hope that what you say is true, namely that collective creation will become something increasingly natural and that we will “shift” to a model of cultural production focused less on individuality and more on community. SDD: Another cross-cutting theme of the book, which could resonate closely with many readers, is that of the “chronically online brain” and the myriad of digital artefacts that are created in order to process the trauma of being constantly ex-13 See note #1. 13 VALENTINA TANNI, SILVIA DAL DOSSO posed to a myriad of other digital artefacts. You talk about sludge content videos, the art of com-piling multiple videos within the same screen so as to cater to the numerous needs of viewers and users now suffering from ADHD and desperate-ly seeking multitasking, and about chaos edits, Dadaist montages of other videos and images found online. Last summer, during my dives into popular science on YouTube, I noticed how these attempts at random juxtaposition are reminiscent of the dreamlike activity our brains perform in the non-REM phase. When we are deeply asleep, the memories of the day appear to us juxtaposed in a speeded-up manner, disregarding the linear sequence of time. Our brain, completely unin-hibited and free from the so-called bias of rea-son, tries to make sense of its memories in order to understand how the world works. This dreamlike activity returns in the game design of Harper Shen’s Therapy (2023),14 “a walking simulator that allows you to wander in your dreams and illusions”, which you rightly compare to Osamu Sato’s LSD: Dream Emulator (1998),15 one of the first walking simulators, games that unfold in a juxtaposition of scenarios without an end goal. The weird adventure games that have come out in the past 20 years are stu-pendous (you cite Yume Nikki from 2004, and I 14 harpershen.itch.io/therapy 15 LSD: Dream Emulator. (2024). In Wikipedia. Retrieved April 16, 2024, from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSD:_Dream_Emulator 14 DAYDREAMS, PLAYABLE NIGHTMARES AND OUT-OF-BODY JOURNEYS would add Undertale from 2015 and Hypnospace Outlaw from 2019), but while in many it is still possible to experience an adventure as a player character, in Therapy interaction is denied. The player can only move through space and watch, as in a dream or on Tumblr: the users find themselves exploring another person’s memories, which again uncannily match their own. If Therapy, an expression of traumacore, looks a lot like Let’s Play, videos in which one watches others play, then perhaps chaos edits are the Let’s Play of the internet, and corecore is the Let’s Play of life during our extinction. What is happening to the ability to choose and the agency of the mind online? Has interactivity turned into zapping, or have we reached the stillness of Nirvana, where the four noble truths are now revealed, and we are in a new state of “transcendental conscious-ness of content as a whole” (lol)? VT: Corecore is the point at which the very concept of core collapses in on itself and reveals itself for what it really is. Its emergence was inevitable. When I first saw the hashtag on TikTok, I thought: “Yeah, of course.” Because in the end, if you think about it, in internet aesthetics it is the suffix that matters, not the prefix. The prefix is interchangeable, you can put anything there, whereas the suffix determines the approach, the inten-tion, the attitude. Core as the will to extract the core of things, searching for their primal energy; but also core as obsession, repetition, exaggeration. I like this idea of 15 VALENTINA TANNI, SILVIA DAL DOSSO chaos edits as the Let’s Play of the internet: maybe it’s a way to imagine yourself inside someone else’s mind, “passively” surfing through their eyes, only to realise, while doing so, that after all, other people’s browsing is not so different from your own. Regarding zapping and Nirvana (lol): interactivity has been naively celebrated for decades, to the point where we experience participation as an obligation (yet another one). Perhaps it is one of the many things we should rethink at this moment in history. Two frames from @heksensabbat’s TikTok, the first to post a corecore edit and coin the term, on 16 July 2022.16 SDD: In the book, you talk about strategies for adapting to an impermanent reality, ranging from reality shifting to the Everything is a Cake meme,17 and hint at the dead internet theory,18 which suggests that humans ceased to exist on the internet in 2016, giving way to bots and arti-16 fey [@heksenabbat]. (2022, July 16). #corecore explanation … [Video]. TikTok. Retrieved April 16, 2024, from www.tiktok.com/@heksensabbat/ video/7183177879759408426 17 Watts, M. (2020, July 13). The “Everything Is a Cake” Meme, Explained Through Jokes. Newsweek. Retrieved April 16, 2024, from www.newsweek.com/ everything-cake-meme-explained-through-jokes-1517441 18 Dead Internet theory. (2024). In Wikipedia. Retrieved April 16, 2024, from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory 16 DAYDREAMS, PLAYABLE NIGHTMARES AND OUT-OF-BODY JOURNEYS ficial entities. After years of emotional targeting and fake news, troll farms, shapeshifting and mediatic coups de théâtre,19 deepfakes and con-spiracies exploited by propaganda, not only do we find ourselves in a permanent state of sus-picion, but adaptation has led us to move from one fictional universe to another as if the online world were a giant LARP that is spreading into our daily lives. We have welcomed the fake into our homes as we would an ugly souvenir given by grandma or a calendar from a Chinese deli. But the online fake is viscous, and if we want to keep it at bay, the passive mode of Let’s Play might be a trap; for now, internet creators seem to have reacted in other ways, often exploiting the memetic, weird and cursed aspect of early rudimentary generative AI (I refer to The Deep Mellow Valley 20 and the video essay The Future Ahead Will Be Weird AF 21). In your online journeys – you still know how to surf as they used to in the splendid 1.0 – what have you seen happening to those who create or chronically inhabit a world where everything might be fake? And what role do gen AIs take in this scrum? 19 Hains, T. (2016, October 12). BBC’s Adam Curtis: How Propaganda Turned Russian Politics Into Theater. Real Clear Politics. Retrieved April 16, 2024, from www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/10/12/bbcs_adam_curtis_how_ propaganda_turned_russian_politics_into_a_circus.html 20 Dal Dosso, S. (2024, January 11). The Deep Mellow Valley. Institute of Network Cultures. Retrieved April 16, 2024, from networkcultures.org/ longform/2024/01/11/the-deep-mellow-valley 21 Parts 1 and 2 available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhZ058-lI6g and www. youtube.com/watch?v=ZpNRfzwnXJc. 17 VALENTINA TANNI, SILVIA DAL DOSSO VT: It is increasingly difficult “to surf as they used to in the splendid 1.0” because the internet is no longer what it was in 1998, or even 2006. The ocean is much larg-er and more tumultuous; messages are difficult to deci-pher; finding safe harbours is a remote possibility. The more one tries to avoid predetermined routes, the more one feels the power of the mainstream current. Social platforms, targeted advertising, algorithmic content selection: everything tends to bring us back into the mainstream, the one that numbs and homogenises us. Despite everything, I always try; it is my form of resistance. To answer your question: creating – but also just existing – in a world where everything could be fake (but also bot generated) is a new existential condition. The responses to this situation could not be more diverse: I see people who are not at all aware of the change and continue to take (more or less) everything at face value; I see people who have converted to scepticism and prac-tise it as a religion; I also see people who have a lot of fun playing with the realms of the true, the false and the verisimilar, inventing aesthetics and modes of expression. Like grandma’s ugly souvenir, in the end we kind of like it, even if we are ashamed to say so. Generative AIs are like a bottomless pit; when we use them, an infinite space opens up before us: the combina-torial vertigo, the potentially unstoppable paths of auto-matic generation. Even there, we are on a threshold; beyond is the unknown and sticky substance of latent space. 18 Valentina Tanni, Silvia Dal Dosso Daydreams, Playable Nightmares and Out-of-Body Journeys Original title: Sogni a occhi aperti, incubi giocabili e viaggi fuori dal corpo PostScriptUM #50 Series edited by Janez Fakin Janša Electronic edition Publisher: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana www.aksioma.org | aksioma@aksioma.org Represented by: Marcela Okretič Translation into English: Marko Bauer Proofreading: Miha Šuštar Design: Federico Antonini Cover image: KIDD Gorgeous, Poggers Playground, 2022 © Aksioma | All text and image rights reserved by the author Ljubljana, April 2024 Published in the frame of the project .expub funded by the European Union. networkcultures.org/expub Views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them. Additionally supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana. Originally published online in Italian by NERO–Not in March 2024. not.neroeditions.com/sogni-a-occhi-aperti-incubi-giocabili -e-viaggi-fuori-dal-corpo Can thought aka theory be as fast and up-to-date as reality itself? Perhaps not, but this conversation between Valentina Tanni and Silvia Dal Dosso about internet aesthetics (and, inevitably, ethics) comes as close to it as possible. What are “landscapes beyond the threshold”, why a suffix is more #core than a prefix and how dark has hivemind become in the meantime? Hell, let’s just call it Applied Post-Ballardianism – “we all went to the same pool”, after all. Valentina Tanni is an art historian and curator. She is interested in the relationship between art and technology, with a special focus on internet cultures. Silvia Dal Dosso is an artist, creative director and researcher in the field of digital technologies and web subcultures. She is one of the co-founders of the Clusterduck collective. ISBN 978-961-7173-49-9 €0 Document Outline fcbd73e6df38194376fa626e9341cd667ce75365106f0edc4634d909eec06abd.pdf fcbd73e6df38194376fa626e9341cd667ce75365106f0edc4634d909eec06abd.pdf ef1a55be09a54ba8e7afb3e39b7cf69a10e640f7973e988a9704e2347f1f291c.pdf ef1a55be09a54ba8e7afb3e39b7cf69a10e640f7973e988a9704e2347f1f291c.pdf fcbd73e6df38194376fa626e9341cd667ce75365106f0edc4634d909eec06abd.pdf