This past Saturday the Band of Burnouts research lab presented We Are Not Sick at Zurich’s annual contemporary music festival Lange Nacht. As part of the presentation, an accompanying publication was available onsite for guests including an interview with one-half of the We Are Not Sick duo, Geert Lovink. …
In Parts I and II, we traced a line from Kid Cudi to Machine Gun Kelly (MGK)—via SNL—to the revival of pop punk in the US musical mainstream. We ended with the co-conspiracy between MGK and Yungblud to “bring back rock’n’roll.” To round off this cultural commentary on what’s brewing in pop music today, this third part ties up their collaboration and makes a link with Miley Cyrus via the mysterious indications provided by SNL’s selection of musical guests. …
In Part I, we looked at Kid Cudi’s internet-breaking dress moment on Saturday Night Live (SNL) earlier this month. In Part II, we go further with the SNL musical guests, having noticed something brewing in (American) pop music that hasn’t happened in a long time. It’s strange that the common link here is SNL. Why would a long-running (maybe outdated) comedy sketch and variety show potentially be a present signal, a radar, of what is manifesting within pop music? Though perhaps the question is rather, why not?
Kid Cudi showed up on Saturday Night Live (SNL) in a dress, and the internet exploded. Presumably this was exciting because it was a man, in a dress. There is a long history of American popular culture misrepresenting trans people with harmful stereotypes, tropes, and appropriating ballroom culture, etc. This appearance by Cudi (or Cudder as he is fondly called by fans) felt like a re-run of a tonne of problems seen before (for an intro to the missteps of American film and TV in portrayals of trans lives see Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen, a documentary by Sam Feder that premiered at Sundance in 2020 before being purchased by Netflix.)
On Content Moderators and the Illusion of AI.This article was originally published in Rosa Mercedes,
the online journal of the Harun Farocki Institut.
‘The panic attacks started after Chloe watched a man die. She spent the past three and a half weeks in training, trying to harden herself against the daily onslaught of disturbing posts: the hate speech, the violent attacks, the graphic pornography. In a few more days, she will become a full-time Facebook content moderator, or what the company she works for, a professional services vendor named Cognizant, opaquely calls a “process executive.” …
Originally published in MARCH Journal of Art & Strategy.
We begin recalling a story from something seen online only to realize midway through that the facts are hard to retreive. Where did I see that quote? What was the name of that author? Where did I find this image again? Who was it that posted that tweet? How long ago was I on that page? The communication of a point evades coherent oral transmission and we side-step ‘I’m not doing it justice’ with a reference to a source that seems to have become unlocatable, having slipped away into the endless online ephemera of the lost unknown. …
