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reality, then what does this mean for its potency as a narrative agent,
and how might this potency already be instantiated?
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So, what is the topography of the present, the context from which to
begin? China Miville (2008: 105) has diagnosed an epochal shift in
contemporary culture, commensurate with the ineluctability of
neoliberalisms There Is No Alternative, as the Tentacular Novum.
This is to understand the distributed, teeming and uncontainable
locus of neoliberal influence as comparable to the alien
monstrosities of Weird fiction, such as those that populate H. P.
Lovecrafts Cthulu mythos. (Although Benjamin Bratton (2015)
also looks beyond the market-structures of the world towards the
obfuscated Weird culture of algorithms working beneath the
machinations of the post-internet world, referring to these bots and
agents as Morlocks, a term borrowed from H. G Wells). Such
creatures of the unknown are distinguishable from traditional or
gothic precedents in fiction by their tentacular, centreless
formlessness often confounding the descriptive capacities of their
own authors. Consequently, they engender a breathless and
unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces the dmons of
unplumbed space (Lovecraft, 1927). This is not to characterize the
complexities of planetary-scale computerized capitalism as some un-
representable sublime, nor as something that operates without, or
out-with, the dialectical participation of human habits, emotional
experiences and neural activities as productive labour. Rather, the
Tentacular Novum is a fecund heuristic that illustrates exactly how
deeply entangled these nebulous complexities are with human
subjective chemistries. It is the insidious and tentacular reach of
neoliberal capitalism, and the subsequent colonization of thought
and action that is essential to the conditions of real subsumption and
its anthropological impact. It is Benjamin Brattons description of
the complex, opaque and auto-obfuscatory algo-culture informing
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The reason for this essays turn towards examples of music and art is
due to its recognition of these fields as intensive public wanderings
and wonderings (the navigational and the sense-making, the
cartographic) through the holographic swamp (Lorange, 2014: ii)
and cognition-maiming fog (Negarestani, 2013) of the dense
meshworks and materialities of contemporary technology, politics,
their possibilities, probabilities and their affective conditions. In so
doing, they offer direct purchase upon the constitution and
capabilities of the avatar as a narrative drone-agent by implementing
a para-tactical constructivism from within the accumulated rubble
and ruin of human extelligence. They begin to provide one possible
answer to the question that the work of Amanda Beech broaches:
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In its transversal and katabatic reaching out, the avatar presents itself
as such an objectile, an epistemic device that introduces noise to a
given system (of thought) by opening a new field of relations
within by infection. Avatars deployed as objectiles breach the
threshold of given systems, opening the opportunity for contagious
maladaptation of that system by its Outside this is noise
operating as the greatest single disease-vector of civilization
(Ballard, 2014: 154). Speculation, in this sense, can be likened to
Deleuze and Guatarris (1988) notion of the probe-head, which,
like noise, is relative to a given situation or system, and might in fact
be any form of practice any regime that ruptures the dominant.
(OSullivan, 2004: 313). As with the drone-agents to be discussed,
[p]robe-heads are produced from within the capitalist mode of
production, from the same materials as it were, but they are that
which deterritorializes its flows further, operating against the
axiomatic functioning of capital, but plugging into its logics of
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And so, there is the shared transversal logic of the avatar here, of
descending into darkness, of katabasis.
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deep web that are plumbed for hellish perspectives, but rather the
banal and accessible networks that comprise daily life such as
YouTube and the ubiquitous forums for exploiting and defining
sexual activity. Here, again, hell is the psychic occulted grain of the
commonplace, and it is a pervasive atmosphere of dread, anxiety and
paranoia that equips the characters in the film with a specific
modality of orientation, akin to the Surrealist technique known as
the paranoiac-critical method. Rather than a separate place, Hell is
portrayed as the collective delirium induced in the Tentacular
Novum, which furnishes its subjects with a shock of recognition
that never ends (Koolhaas, 1998: 238).
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One can now see how such drone-units are constructed for
deployment, and what kind of subjectivity or disposition they
embody. Perhaps though, subjectivity is the wrong term, given the
not-quite-human register and make-up of these avatars. Eva
Papamargaritis 2014 film No Boredom, No Pain, No Routine
epitomizes the existential angst of discarded virtual beings without a
purpose, fabulated by accident from rendered tentacles, guns,
chassis, life-models Similarly, Benjamin Nuels film Hotel (2013)
also shares a narrative comprised of an anonymous cast of computer
game henchmen inhabiting a virtual limbo falling apart, wondering
what their role in the world is and could be. To account for the
human-like intonations of a machinic vision or form of
consciousness belonging to the emergent and disoriented drone,
these subjects might well be considered in terms of a medievally-
inclined ontology that posits not only a porosity, but perhaps even
an indistinction, between person and object. This can be noted in
the activity of artists who treat their self as an object of
experimentation and fabulation for the deployment of artificial
narratives, such as rappers Mykki Blanco and Nikki Minaj:
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Their viral and miasmatic infection of the world with their noise-
fiction-speculation depends, lastly, to begin again to answer Amanda
Beechs concerns voiced at the beginning of this text, upon what Ben
Woodard has termed slime dynamics, or a dark vitalism, towards
the symbiogenetic appropriation of a slime cognition through the
inhuman life of the avatar. Slime mold, or physarum polycephalum,
perfectly embodies this living instantiation of the mindless
functioning of life, an inhuman intelligence comparable to both the
extra-cognitive decision making capabilities of the autonomous
avatar-drone and the polycephalus swarm-authorship materialized
variously in the anonymous collectivity of Vaporwave and in Minajs
weird multiplicities. Avatars, in their drone-capacities,
autonomously work in and on the world, reading it and writing it
through a practice of world-production. But this is not a purely
haphazard contingency, nor a sober engineering, but instead a
darker Prometheanism attuned to the Weird contingencies,
inconsistencies, and nested cracks or plot-holes in contemporary
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Notes
References
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