Are You There? Part 2

 It's so interesting to observe how "safe" arts and entertainment feel overall right now. Anyone else have any thoughts on this?


Boundary: I will not debate either cancel culture as a concept or the ethics of AIs with you.

But it's so interesting to observe. I'd love to create a followup video piece to our "Are You There?" short we did last year that explores arts and entertainment as an especially self-soothing mechanism of familiarity right now. Even a lot of the AI cyberpunky stuff that's getting generated has this very fantasy, dreamlike quality. Nostalgia is getting recycled at a breakneck pace.

And a lot of the "experimental" stuff out there, at least in my entertainment-based town, is specifically rehashing a lot of the same very fem-leaning stuff. How are fems subverting or playing with or conforming to tropes and expectations? How are historically marginalized people reinserting themselves into utterly Disneyfied, conventional narratives? I've been kind of riffing on this for the past few days to find a way through.

And note, I'm only very lightly judging this, mostly because I know who I am and who MMIX also is as an artist/artists, and we are all of not-that. Even my queerness doesn't conform to a lot of expectations and hasn't, really.

I'd love to make an appearance on a podcast or two or maybe even briefly on a streaming docu or show. In 2019 I tried to pitch to people to be on their podcasts and they were just like "who the fuck are you and why should we care?" and I'm not entirely sure that much has shifted since then, but what I will say is since then I/Rust and I have had almost 3 and a half years of making our own art in our own style--with no major obligations to represent cultures like my practice of sharqi/oryantal used to have and very much uniquely our own, as much as anything is unique these days.

So just putting it out there. It's hovering me, and us, at the edge of something very precarious and heartbreak-feeling, and I'm not sure what's next.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Gender rant: I'm not here to give you a boner and neither is anyone else.

I'm going to work this kind of like a list of extended bullet points. Hey, kids. So let's talk about a little something called gender expression. Gender expression comes in many different varieties, and has taken on different sub-labels in popular or regional culture. Some of these labels that you might know are concepts like "dyke" "femme" "twink" "tranny" and other terms. Though there doesn't seem to be an overarching consensus on whether or not certain terms are considered offensive, partially due to the culture of term reappropriation in recent years (for instance, affectionately or cattily using the term "fag" within the gay male community), mainstream culture has adopted some terms and concepts as shorthand for certain gendered lifestyles. I argue this- No one should be unfairly reduced to their gender expression by anyone else. I believe that it is unfair to assume that someone considered to adopt a more convent...
Read more

Pop Culture Nation-A Recovered Memory of Cherished Treasures

Sometime between 2004 and Spring of 2006, I forcefully slammed a very large shoebox full of cassette tapes into the garbage can at my mother's house. You don't understand. Not just original cassette tapes. Mix tapes. During the peak hipster era of High Fidelity and Say Anything (much older, because yes we were already rehashing nostalgia), I committed a high crime against art and Xennial self-determination. I remember neither the context of the conflict, nor why I desired so strongly to sabotage myself. Was it later than then? Had I moved out again? Was it closer to 2008? I couldn't tell you. But I knew I was on one of my decluttering kicks. Inasmuch as I am messy and allow things to pile up (hopefully not to a hoarderly level) I have also gotten on occasionally forceful kicks of throwing my possessions away. Mostly because they reminded me of a part of myself that was over. Around this same time I think I dumped all the handwritten letters between me and beloved friends be...
Read more

Dream Brother

Twin seeds, planted in one long planter. Soon, a large landmass would stand between us. I wish I hadn't absorbed, from somewhere, that only the coasts mattered. And here we are. So much between us, including life & water under the bridge. I miss New York but I'm not built to root there. Just to visit. I think there was a time in my life when going there could've propelled me. They would've "gotten" what I was doing. But that was a small window of time. Now it's over. So much similar between us but so many parts of us different. And yet so much in common too. It feels like long ago but hey, obvious why we were pretty much "The Crayons" together. The queers in the 'burbs claw in the dark to find each other. Our absurd reads, endless summers and maybe the mystery trousers left in my trunk. Beach days, then you moved out right after we graduated. Things got tangible quickly. We did grownup things at 18 in a state where you didn't have to...
Read more