Post-Internet and cyborgism

While the term ‘Post-Internet’ was coined in 2008 (Debatty Reference Debatty2008), 2014's ‘Art Post-Internet: INFORMATION/DATA’ (Archey and Peckham Reference Archey and Peckham2014) offers the clearest manifesto for the artistic style:

The Post-Internet era is marked by complete absorption and comprehension of the systems and identity politics that define the web. The Post-Internet generation's identity is increasingly intertwined with digital spaces and networks. Thinking ‘in the fashion of the network’ occurs organically for those that accept the ‘centrality’ of the Internet within contemporary culture as a commonplace aspect of everyday life. These members of the Post-Internet generation have little experience of a world without constant connectivity or social media. The term differentiates those that were born or reached pubescence in the mid-2000s or later from those born earlier: the ‘Internet’ generation for whom the web was something new, rather than a natural element of daily existence. If someone has spent their entire conscious lives surrounded by the digital, and therefore has no comprehension of a world without it, they are entirely at ease with (or even as one with) these technologies and virtual spaces. Archey and Peckham explain that Post-Internet art displays ‘a consciousness of the networks within which it exists. [It considers] issues related to Internet policy, mass clandestine surveillance and data mining, the physicality of the network, the posthuman body’ (Archey and Peckham Reference Archey and Peckham2014, pp. 8–9). It assumes a symbiotic relationship with contemporary media and explores the impact of this relationship self-consciously. The web is now such a critical aspect of everyday lives that ‘distinct virtual and analogue spaces have collapsed’, meaning that people are ‘online all the time’ even when not physically staring at a screen (Cornell Reference Cornell2013). This has changed ‘our behaviours [and] even the way we think’, leading to art that studies the ramifications for identity in a world that is simultaneously digital and analogue, virtual and physical, cybernetic and organic (Cornell Reference Cornell2013). Post-Internet audiences have ‘multiple browser windows open, all competing for attention’ in both their virtual and physical lives (ADR 2015), and ‘with cyberspace available on every smartphone handset, we are never outside … the digital realm’ (Fisher Reference Fisher2014, loc. 3368).

Nathan Jurgenson (Reference Jurgenson2012) emphasises this lack of separation between virtual and physical spaces. He criticises attempts to render the online less legitimate than the ‘real’ world, arguing that ‘we've been told to resist technological intrusions. … Turn off your phones, log off social media, and learn to reconnect offline’. This mentality makes the mistake of assuming that using digital technologies means ‘leaving the here and now for something digital, some other, cyber, space’ (Jurgenson Reference Jurgenson2012). In actuality, the Post-Internet era is defined by the lack of difference between being online and offline: everyone is constantly and ‘symbiotically’ connected to virtual spaces at all times (Jurgenson Reference Jurgenson2012). Rather than ‘viewing the online and offline as largely distinct’, there must be a ‘far more synthetic understanding of technology and society, media and bodies, physicality and information as perpetually enmeshed and co-determining’ (Jurgenson Reference Jurgenson2014). He argues that

This issue defines the Post-Internet: contemporary youths are at one with virtual environments and digital networks, and these phenomena are intrinsically inseparable from their organic lives and identities. It is not that web users ‘escape’ into these spaces and systems; rather, they are now so ubiquitous that they must be considered part of the ‘real’ world. As musician James Ferraro asserts, ‘people are essentially wearing the Internet, eating it, hearing it, talking about it all the time, because everything is like a symptom of an Internet driven society’ (Gibb Reference Gibb2011).

There are connections between Post-Internet themes and posthumanism, with Archey and Peckham emphasising explorations of ‘the physicality of the network [and] the posthuman body’ in Post-Internet art (Archey and Peckham Reference Archey and Peckham2014, p. 9). Posthumanism evolved from 1970s–1980s cyberpunk, which was informed by the accelerating presence of digital technology in the late-twentieth century. The term that came to describe cyberpunk's theorised hybridisation of human and machine is ‘cyborg’. Donna Haraway defines the cyborg as ‘a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism’ (Haraway Reference Haraway and Haraway1990). It is ‘oppositional [and] utopian’, with its ungraspable mutability offering a ‘post-gender’ identity (Haraway Reference Haraway and Haraway1990). Her proposition is that women should exploit ‘cyborg imagery [to find] a way out of the maze of dualisms’ that defines patriarchal culture (Haraway Reference Haraway and Haraway1990). Haraway's cyborg undermines binary-driven heteronormative discourse, instead promoting an ever-changing cybernetic identity that is the equivalent of ‘speaking in tongues’ to destroy ‘the circuits’ of patriarchal dominance (Haraway Reference Haraway and Haraway1990). Katherine Hayles (Reference Hayles1999) titled this concept ‘posthumanism’. Hayles is insistent about the importance of the ‘human’ part of the term, explaining that ‘human awareness unfolds in ways very different from those of intelligence embodied in cybernetic machines’ (Hayles Reference Hayles1999, pp. 283–4). Posthumanism is a fusion of human and machine that enhances the humanity of the individual. The temporal prefix ‘post’ highlights the fact that hybridisation is an adaptive evolutionary method of preventing the species from going obsolete (Hayles Reference Hayles1999). The posthuman is in opposition to conservative notions of the self as ‘grounded in presence, … originary guarantees and teleological trajectories, associated with solid foundations and logical coherence’ (Hayles Reference Hayles1999, p. 286). By fusing with technology, the posthuman has the ability to think differently to, and escape the human autonomy of, those with ‘wealth, power, and leisure’ (Hayles Reference Hayles1999). It is, as such, a concept that appeals strongly to marginalised groups such as women, LGBTQ communities and ethnic minorities.

The link to Post-Internet ideas is clear: the Post-Internet generation has fused with digital spaces, rendering them ‘posthuman’ in comparison with those that do not have the same symbiotic relationship with these technologies. There is ‘nothing anti-human about technology: the smartphone that you rub and take to bed is a technology of flesh. Information penetrates the body in increasingly more intimate ways’ (Jurgenson Reference Jurgenson2014), while ‘the way in which we interact with these technologies is altering our physical and emotive states, and in turn technologies are responding to these developments’ (Herndon 2014). These relationships have granted Post-Internet artists a platform on which new and mutable identities can be explored. As practitioners such as Tabita Rezaire put it, Post-Internet art ‘embraces the digital and all its contradictions; it's like another language to express yourself with. Like any language, it limits and controls the way you think, but it also gives access to new dimensions and creates new feelings’ (Rezaire, in Parker Reference Parker2016).

Holly Herndon and Post-Internet identity

Composer Holly Herndon's music embraces Post-Internet ideas while investigating the continuing prominence of posthuman themes in digital culture. Her track ‘Chorus’ (from Platform, RVNG Intl 2015) draws on the ‘intimate [but] naive romance’ that she maintains with digital networks and technologies (Herndon 2014). ‘Chorus’ is built from vocal samples, with Herndon suggesting that ‘the voice is a great place to start as it is the original instrument’ (Herndon 2014) and thus best represents the identity of its performer. Herndon's voices on ‘Chorus’ come ‘from several different sources – online browsing, synthesis, my own processed voice, samples, etc. all recorded through my laptop’ (Ableton 2014). Each of these voices is fused into a vocal collage that represents Herndon's identity online. The voices are chosen by ‘a system which [spies] on my own online browsing, sample[s] the material, and smash[es] it together. It basically takes material coming in from my browser and [creates] interesting interactions’ (Ableton 2014). As such, the voices on ‘Chorus’ form, in effect, an image of the artist as drawn by her own technology. As Jurgenson notes:

There is no distinction between the identities of Post-Internet users online or offline, with each informing the other constantly and generating pressures to act in specific ways in both virtual and physical environments. This mirrors the ideas of Fisher (Reference Fisher2011), who asserts that the ubiquitous use of smartphones, alongside the instantaneous nature of social networking, has resulted in a generation increasingly preoccupied with – and, in turn, controlled by – its technological devices. Indeed, it is not just digital media's impact on the ‘real world’ that is critical to Post-Internet identity politics. ‘Real life’ activities simultaneously inform the construction of these networks and the personas presented on them. As Jurgenson notes,

The Internet is an everyday aspect of existence and identity. It informs the way that people act in the physical world, and these activities correspondingly impact on the development of digital networks.

This symbiotic connection between the Post-Internet generation and its technology is a key element of Herndon's work. Musician ADR believes that ‘carefully curated streams of images and bits of text’ now constitute an artist's ‘self-created context’ (ADR 2015), and this has clearly informed Herndon's output. The composition ‘Chorus’ is built entirely from Herndon's browsing activity. The ‘image’ that Herndon's technology has constructed of herself appears entirely digital on the surface, as it is generated wholly from online sounds and samples. However, by forming a collage from her own personality traits, actions and tastes, Herndon has created a cyborgian version of herself in musical form. This approach extinguishes the dominance of ‘conventional divisions – between the natural and the synthetic’ (Kalev Reference Kalev2014a) and, crucially, between human and automaton; online and offline. The identity developed in ‘Chorus’ is not entirely human, but its accurate sourcing and amalgamation of human traits, combined with the emotive nature of its sounds, also prevents it from being completely virtual. The track is Post-Internet in form, oscillating between organic existence and digital spaces and revealing them to be intrinsically inseparable.

Herndon regards Haraway and Hayles as ‘prophetic’ but aimed at a generation that was not intimately connected to its technologies (Herndon 2014). She believes that art must expand on posthuman ideas to explore the ‘symbiotic and demonstrable’ relationship that people have with digital networks in the Post-Internet era (Herndon 2014). What Herndon is replicating is the fact that Post-Internet identity is defined by a co-dependent relationship between digital spaces and their inhabitants/users, and that by injecting personal information into their devices web users actually become one with them. Social media, laptops and smartphones contain so many aspects of a person's identity that they, in many ways, are an extension of that person: ‘I sometimes say that my laptop knows me better than I know myself’ (Ableton 2014).

She argues that it is now practically a necessity for Post-Internet generations to maintain a carefully constructed image of themselves both offline and online, explaining that ‘one can never be sure if you are performing or not’ on the Internet (Herndon 2014). To be truly Post-Internet is to be incapable of separating the virtual from the organic, and this is due in part to the constant uploading (and shaping) of information about one's self to digital media. One cautionary note that dominates Herndon's work is her assertion that web users have become increasingly reluctant ‘to express their true opinions out of an implicit awareness that they are being observed’ owing to a culture in which companies ‘check your Facebook profile before they hire you – we have online “permanent records” so to speak’ (Herndon 2014). Herndon is concerned about revelations regarding ‘NSA activity and personal privacy’ (Ableton 2014) and suggests that if her laptop is capable of constructing an accurate portfolio of her interests and activities (as displayed in ‘Chorus’), any person or agency tracking her online movements is able to do the same. As her partner (and Post-Internet theorist/artist) Mathew Dryhurst puts it, ‘the private is more political than it ever has been’, owing to both the on-going NSA revelations and the increasing prominence of ‘applications like Google Now [that] utilise information they have collected about you in order to provide more convenient/tailored services’ and companies such as ‘Axciom, who collect and sell nuanced profiles of us as individuals to companies so that they may target us directly’ (Swift Reference Swift2015).

This invasion of privacy is the theme of her piece ‘Home’. The track comprises many layers of digital dissonance with Herndon's vocals repeating lines such as ‘I know that you know me better than I know me’. Herndon argues that ‘my laptop is an extension of my memory and self, it is a conduit to the people I care about and in many ways retains more knowledge about me in one moment than I can muster. “Home” is a breakup song for a naïve romance’ (Herndon 2014). As such, Herndon regards her laptop – and web presence – as a prosthetic part of her identity, and as something that is ‘fundamental to our lives, we actually have little choice about our participation as [these technologies] become increasingly tied to work, sociality and how others perceive us’ (Herndon 2014). She thus naturally feels personal grievance when her private digital (but intimate) space is quite literally infiltrated by others. ‘Home’ is, as she puts it, a ‘breakup song’ between her and her once trusted communicative technology. This is a typically Post-Internet evocation of the sensitive and emotional relationship between web users and their digital devices. These themes are expanded in her live performances, which feature contributions from Mat Dryhurst. During these shows, Dryhurst conducts

This technique further enhances the Post-Internet nature of Herndon's music (digitality is inseparable from physicality here, with social media outlets permeating real-world performance) while amplifying the importance that virtual environments and online identities play in the ‘offline’ lives of contemporary audiences. Constructing selves on social networks involves constant performance and self-regulation, and these web-based identities increasingly infiltrate physical spaces. Herndon's work, in absolutely fusing the organic human and the cybernetic posthuman, highlights the resonances of these Post-Internet cultural experiences and imagines the potential for an expanding Post-Internet approach to identity politics and musical composition.

Post-Internet and queerness

Intimate Post-Internet relationships drive explorations of gender and queer identity in the work of many musicians operating within the Post-Internet aesthetic. These artists fuse the fluid conceptual framework of queer theory with posthumanism to create a thematic trend that I dub ‘digital queer’. The musician ADR argues that ‘symptomatic of life online is love online, with so much of meeting, flirting, courting and building relationships happening in cyberspace’ (ADR 2015), highlighting the fact that the cyborgian identities of Post-Internet generations impact heavily on discussions surrounding gender and sexuality. Queer theory has its roots in the writing of Judith Butler (Reference Butler1988, Reference Butler1990), who argues that gender is constructed, performed and fluctuating. As she explains, ‘gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts precede; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time; an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts’ (Butler Reference Butler1988, p. 519). Gender is not a biological prescriptive ‘model of identity’ that defines a person's actions or feelings from birth. It is a performance of identity that is malleable and informed by ‘social temporality’ (where the person is, who they are with, what they are doing, etc.; Butler Reference Butler1988, p. 520). A person ‘selects’ their gender by wearing a particular costume – both literal (as in their choice of clothes/hairstyle) and metaphorical (as in their ‘performance’ – tastes, actions, vocal cadence, etc.) – and these costumes are inhabited and shed on a regular basis. Binary definitions of gender (male vs. female, homosexual vs. heterosexual, etc.) are therefore flawed. Queer thus became an inclusive term for various gendered minorities in opposition to (largely heteronormative) dominance. Taking identity's constructed performativity as a starting point, it rejects binaries between genders/sexualities in favour of a discourse of fluidity and fluctuation. It provides an equal platform for the multiplicity of minority groups in contemporary culture while simultaneously celebrating the differences between them and undermining dominant forms of representation. Berlant and Warner assert that queering must not depreciate into a mere ‘umbrella for gays, lesbians, bisexuals’ and transgenders; rather, it must retain the very ‘unpredictability’ that initially inspired it (Berlant and Warner Reference Berlant and Warner1995, p. 344). It is empowered through its subversive ability to ‘take on varied shapes, risks, ambitions, and ambivalences in various contexts’ (Berlant and Warner Reference Berlant and Warner1995). To reflect the ever-shifting nature of gender, queer must itself be a malleable concept, removing the possibility of minority groups becoming constricted by traditional binaries of gender.

Digital queering (i): 18+

To clearly define digital queering and its relationship to Post-Internet themes, I now explain the ways in which gender has been queered in virtual spaces more generally. The prominence of ‘avatars’ online has enabled web users to ‘perform’ multiple identities other than their own. This has resulted in experimental gender performances online, and a large body of academic work is dedicated to the trend for web users to inhabit many mutable digital sexual personas. Clark (Reference Clark2009) and Elund (Reference Elund2012) discuss the role of Second Life, a virtual ‘environment … where any individual … can create a representational embodiment of themselves to interact with others real-time’ (Elund Reference Elund2012), in relation to gender performativity. The anonymity afforded by this program enables ‘individuals to experiment with various guises of their identity such as bodily form and sexuality’ (Elund Reference Elund2012). Second Life users can take on the virtual form of any (and many) gendered identities that they desire. This cyborgian 3D ‘self’ is known as an avatar. One of the inevitable outcomes of this process is that many avatars populate Second Life that are physically wholly dissimilar to their creators, and indeed the anonymity afforded by these images allows users to behave and speak in ways that may be entirely unreflective of their ‘organic’ identity. Turkle asserts that, in these environments, ‘the self is not only decentred but multiplied without limit’, highlighting the unlimited spectrum of gendered identities that a user can inhabit (Turkle Reference Turkle1994). 18+, an R&B duo comprised of musicians Justin and Samia, utilise Second Life avatars and constructed/performed online identities to explore digital queering and intimate relationships with technology. They see ‘a huge gap, or discrepancy, between the user and the platform, or the images on [Second Life]. A shitty avatar [is] a very concrete example of a constructed but not totally convincing identity. … I think we're becoming more symbiotic with computers’ (18 + 2014).

This embodiment of different visual identities online is not stable, and can come across as ‘unconvincing’ owing to its fluctuating nature. As outlined above, the most crucial theme of queer theory is that of fluidity and mutability, and Post-Internet users engaging in web-based gender explorations are embracing this. Roberts and Parks argue that this ‘experimental behaviour’ is temporary, and is not necessarily ‘an enduring expression’ of an individual's personal gendered orientation (Roberts and Parks Reference Roberts and Parks1999, p. 537). However, this fails to recognise the collapse between virtual and organic experiences that defines the Post-Internet generation. As Jurgenson astutely notes, ‘there isn't a person and then an avatar, a real world and then an Internet. They're merged’ (Jurgenson Reference Jurgenson2014). There is now an inseparable relationship between the web and the performance of identity, and gender is a critical aspect of this. The mutability and anonymity of the web have rendered it an environment in which the identity politics associated with both posthumanism and queer theory have the potential to flourish in alignment with one another. The Internet is a space through which posthuman identities develop, and this has occurred in conjunction with a wider interest in performative gender politics. Greene asserts that ‘sexual orientation is being challenged by the millennials. [The] lines between male and female have become increasingly blurred, and we're seeing that reflected’ in music (La Ferla Reference La Ferla2015). The Internet has provided an open forum in which queer identities can be explored safely owing to its liberating promotion of anonymity and taking on multiple personas. This is digital queering: a fusion of the themes of both posthumanism and queer theory, reflecting the potential for gender play enabled by the Post-Internet condition.

As indicated, 18+ have sought to highlight these issues in their Second Life-inspired output. They state that:

Justin and Samia's interests lie in the ways in which those participating in online culture construct digital identities that are not ‘totally convincing’, and that are often regarded as fantasies designed to be played out in what is regarded as a safe virtual environment (18 + 2014). Yet an issue reflected in their work is the understanding that, in a Post-Internet world, these virtual spaces are not entirely ‘safe’ or ‘fantastical’ as they are not separate from the physical realm. Web users have an interdependent relationship with their technological devices and are therefore shaped by their ‘fake’ digital selves. Until 2014, 18+ remained entirely anonymous, offering no interviews or publicity photos. The sole representation that they granted their fan-base was a selection of music videos comprising found footage of robots and sexualised avatars constructed in Second Life. 18+ were, for a significant portion of their public existence, visualised purely as predominantly female avatars, sexualised through repetitive images of them dancing wearing only bikinis. Justin refers to these images as ‘sexy cyborgs’, highlighting the intimate relationship between one's physical and virtual (in this case, an avatar) identity. As Samia puts it, the connection is ‘completely natural’ (18 + 2014). 18+ are replicating the idea that these unconvincing avatars are impacting on the ‘organic’ emotions of the Post-Internet generation.

One of the key methods that the duo utilises to amplify these themes is a fusion of virtual avatar imagery and hyper-sexualised (to the point of discomfort) lyrical content. Songs graphically and explicitly celebrate masturbation, foreplay and oral sex. An issue that drives 18+ is the notion of ‘negotiating public vs. private’, which has become increasingly difficult in a culture driven by social media's promotion of constant self-celebritisationFootnote ² (18+2014). This creates a scenario where people reveal far more about themselves than is necessary or, indeed, desirable. This theme inspires the ‘extreme intimacy or disclosure of emotion’ that defines their lyrical style (18+2014). If everything about everyone is being placed online, the concept of intimacy and privacy becomes warped, and 18+’s hyper-revelatory lyrics embrace this issue fully. Fisher explains that the ‘besieging of attention’ brought about by a saturated realm of information overload and easy access to nigh-infinite examples of pornographic material online results in a ‘de-eroticised culture’ (Fisher Reference Fisher2014, loc. 288–93). ‘The art of seduction takes too much time’ in the Post-Internet era, and the rise of ‘Viagra answers not to a biological but to a cultural deficit: desperately short of time, energy and attention, we demand quick fixes’ (Fisher Reference Fisher2014). 18+’s disturbingly pornographic vocals highlight this ‘de-eroticised’ nature of Post-Internet sexuality.

The Post-Internet generation has become increasingly used to a ‘virtual’ form of sexuality that is simultaneously deemed to be extreme but ‘safe’ (owing to its apparent existence outside of ‘reality’). However, the visceral lyrical confessions of Justin and Samia clash with the hyper-digital imagery of their avatars and remind their audience that, in a Post-Internet world, there is no separation between the sexual fantasies that are played out online and those that exist organically. The virtual self is an extension of the physical self, not a unique entity that one can ignore or ‘switch off’ by electing not to use their technology. The Post-Internet generation is always interconnected and sharing an intimate, symbiotic relationship with its digitally constructed identities. 18+’s visuals, sounds and representation present a confrontational and hyper-sensual exploration of the impact that Post-Internet issues have on perhaps the most sensitive aspects of the human psyche: sexuality and intimacy.

Digital queering (ii): Ryan Trecartin and personality-as-identity

This digital queering of gender identity is practised most visibly in the video art of Ryan Trecartin. Trecartin, who is also a musician and directs the videos of many Post-Internet musicians, creates films that are preoccupied with ‘fractured identity in the digital age’ (Lafreniere Reference Lafreniere2010). He combines his interest in queer theory and Post-Internet identity into surreal films in which his characters have their faces painted ‘in primary colours, and [perform] a lot of gender shifting, enhanced by wigs and exaggerated vamping’ (Lafreniere Reference Lafreniere2010). He ‘dresses his characters up in wigs that render them genderless … and then strains the characters’ voices through chipmunk filters’ (Frank Reference Frank2014). Langley explains that this ‘manipulation of the film is so relentless that [a] fusion of physical digital selves is realised within the plane of the image’ (Langley Reference Langley2012). Trecartin achieves this through the exaggerated employment of ‘intensely processed’ digital animation, editing and distortion techniques (Langley Reference Langley2012). In his films:

Through the self-conscious foregrounding of ‘gender shifting’ and the evocation of a ‘fusion of physical digital selves’ Trecartin is investigating the relationship between queering identity and the potential for cyborgian hybridisation online. His films highlight:

A queering of gender and an interest in the impact of contemporary technology on ‘young people’ are central to Trecartin's vision. He acknowledges that these ‘young people live on the Internet and are free to assume various personalities at will’, and studies the potential that the web therefore holds as a space for encouraging non-heteronormative discourse (Tomkins Reference Tomkins2014). He suggests that ‘gender’ itself is an outmoded concept in Post-Internet culture, arguing that ‘personality is replacing gender and how people are defined’ in an era in which identities are increasingly forged and multiplied through social networks (Holsten and Trecartin 2009). Although his rapid editing style is unsettling and discordant, it ‘present[s] the process [of Post-Internet cyborgism] as thrilling, impulsive, and fun’ (Langley Reference Langley2012) by retaining the utopian visions of posthumanism and cyborgism outlined by Haraway and Hayles and celebrating the fact that ‘new technologies create different qualities in understanding and presenting ourselves performatively’ (Lange Reference Lange2008). Trecartin's work is a reflection of the potential to escape heteronormative gender binaries through interaction with digital networks. His videos study ‘how the Internet is being used, and the way it's transforming the way we communicate and share ideas and the way we think of ourselves, and the potential for how we choose to exist’ (Trecartin 2015). He expressionistically emphasises this in his videos through the use of the digital medium itself, with his (un)gendered characters’ personalities symbolically fusing with technology through a confrontational over-use of jump-cuts, garish colours and digital animation. It is not the characters’ words that define them for the audience; it is their digital presentation. Trecartin suggests that online communicative networks have a direct impact on the identities of web users. The Internet and social media are platforms for performing various different genders and selves simultaneously. Trecartin aims to study:

Trecartin is intrigued by the potential ‘diversification of the self’ that is a critical aspect of Post-Internet identity politics. The prominence of avatars in digital environments renders it relatively straightforward for the Post-Internet generation to act out a multitude of roles online. Trecartin sees this as intrinsically positive, suggesting that the online self becomes a canvas for ‘inventiveness and innovation’, enabling web users to escape the limitations that binary thinking places on identity and self-representation due to the potential to be ‘someone else’ in the pseudo-anonymous online world (Trecartin 2015). This dissolves previous prescriptive notions of gender, and instead allows the aforementioned social networking ‘personality’ (or personalities) to be the defining factor in a person's performed identity (or identities). Trecartin is queering the notion of gender boundaries entirely through a celebration of absolute multiplicity and anonymity. The best way, according to Trecartin, to escape the limiting nature of gendered representation is to simultaneously avoid and/or diversify representations of one's self through the use of anonymising and personality-driven virtual networks. This is digital queering in practice.

Digital queering (iii): Mykki Blanco, Arca and Jesse Kanda

Another example of digital queering in Post-Internet music is Michael Quattlebaum Jr and his other self ‘Teen Raptress Mykki Nicole Blanco’ (Kretowicz Reference Kretowicz2013). Quattlebaum's Mykki Blanco persona is a self-conscious fusion of queer theory and posthumanism. While Blanco's transgender performance could be regarded as operating in the ‘drag’ tradition (Taylor Reference Taylor2012, p. 85), heFootnote ³ is informed by a more nuanced understanding of posthuman identity and queer gender. Blanco is defined by his ‘multiplicity’ and he can, at different times, be seen dressed as a glamorous diva, ‘shirtless Michael, with the head shaved’, a ‘Madame Libertine’ figure, and ‘a blue-eyed “genderless”’ being, all of whom frequently employ ‘consciously macho’ lyrics (Kretowicz Reference Kretowicz2013). Blanco is playing with the concept of gender and embracing the potential for fluidity that queer theory promotes. Quattlebaum describes Blanco as being androgynous and ambiguous, insisting that:

Blanco is, essentially, queer gender fluidity in action. He can appear in any costume, representing any gender, and still be Mykki Blanco. This reflects the fact that Post-Internet identity is constantly in flux, emphasising that one cannot be defined by their relationship to any singular gender, while also embracing the culture of gender play generated by the web and avatars. Quattlebaum is ‘fascinated by [the] immediacy in which [individuals are] able to expose themselves’ on the Internet, and he developed Blanco as a reflection of the ‘slightly narcissistic selfie culture’ that is depicted in the videos of Trecartin (Brydon Reference Brydon2013). Blanco is inspired by posthumanism, and has discussed the potential for the web to develop identities that are of a different ‘species’ (Gillespie Reference Gillespie2014). This identification with ‘mutant[s]’ and ‘alien[s]’ (Harper Reference Harper2014) is reminiscent of cyborgism, with Blanco representing the notion that queering can be effectively explored through the use of multiple online pseudonyms and technological prevalence. Terms such as ‘mutant’, ‘alien’ and ‘species’ are associated with posthumanism's theme of moving beyond the restrictions placed on gender and identity by conservative ‘human’ classification. By embracing this pangender form of identification, while continuing to promote fluid and malleable gender politics, Blanco renders himself truly androgynous. This self-representation is enhanced by Blanco's sonic approach, which is partially inspired by noise-hop group Death Grips. Blanco's aesthetic comprises static, glitch and shards of samples from multiple digital sources (including amateur YouTube videos and low-bitrate MP3s). He works with producers such as Gobby, whose corrosive methodology provocatively exploits the Internet's overbearing flood of material through a sampling technique that involves mining YouTube and just ‘grab[bing] anything … random[ly], … like button-mashing’ (Gobby 2015). The resulting cybernetic soundscapes, juxtaposed with Blanco's sexualised vocals and feisty lyrics, are reflective of the dissolution of human identity. Blanco's voice simultaneously clashes and fuses with its static-laden environment, refusing to be defined as either organic or digital: in the Post-Internet era, Blanco is both. By dissolving the binary between automaton and human in his representation and sound, Blanco's digital queering modernises queer theory and posthumanism's central theme: that of ungraspable mutability.

Arca and Jesse Kanda collaborate on audiovisual artworks that study the fluctuations of identity and gender in contemporary culture. The imagery and sonics employed by these two artists are highly abstract, but their emotionality renders them evocative examples of Post-Internet and digital queer ideas. While they both made it clear to me that they did not regard their work as ‘about the Internet or about how we absorb and process things’ in a ‘conscious [or] reactionary’ way that might ‘define’ them as ‘self-aware or ironic’, they acknowledge openly that the web has ‘played a key role in’ their lives and ‘defined [them] as’ people and that they ‘have a very loving view’ of it (Arca, author interview 2015). Arca's Xen (Mute 2014) is an abstract release with textures that, at face value, seem wilfully non-representational.

Indeed, this resulted in reviews in major publications such as Fact and The Wire that seemed uncertain about what to make of the record. By addressing the simplistic language of these reviews, I expand into a discussion of the juxtapositions and emotional contrasts that define the album. Brown's review for The Wire is tied to outmoded notions of emotionality as being entirely separate from electronic music. He ignores personal aspects of the music in favour of rumination about the coldness of electronic soundscapes. He indicates that Xen is ‘indistinguishable from a high tech software demonstration’, with ‘every texture a laboured mirage of plug-ins and processing’ (Brown Reference Brown2014). Indeed, he suggests that Arca's intention is not ‘to invoke some sort of human response’, but is instead to create ‘a variety pack of sonic memes, concise enough for viral dispersion yet dense with the technical wizardry so in demand by deep pocketed, chameleonic pop and hip-hop figures’ (Brown Reference Brown2014).

This is a reductionist view of electronic music in general, and Arca's work specifically. Brown appears incapable of recognising personality, artistic connection or emotionality in textures that are not acoustic or do not have the ‘benefit [of] a rapper with [Arca collaborator Kanye] West's magnetism, or the alien sexuality of FKA twigs, another of [his] employers’ (Brown Reference Brown2014). It is surprising that The Wire, a publication with significant investment in electronica, would present such a folk authenticity-inflicted review of a work that is intrinsically emotive, ambiguous and personal in style.

Maya Kalev claims to acknowledge the personal aspects and ‘ambiguity’ that drove Arca's construction of the record, yet describes it in terms that uphold binary definitions of physical/virtual, emotional/digital, human/robot, etc. The review comprises statements that mirror those of Brown, such as ‘every surface gleams with an unsettling digital shine, but … that sense of hyper-modernity can fall a little flat’; ‘the sequencing is haphazard at best, with tracks seemingly glued to one another arbitrarily rather than describing any narrative order’; and ‘there's very little about [the beats] that's emotionally affecting’ (Kalev Reference Kalev2014b). While music taste is, of course, subjective, and unflattering reviews are an inevitable part of any album release, there is something problematic about these reviewers’ searches for some outmoded form of emotionality in this record.

Xen, according to Arca, is named after a side of his personality that he refers to ‘as “her”, but says [is] neither male nor female’ (Friedlander Reference Friedlander2014), and which is a part of his ‘fragmented’ identity that comes out in much of his work (Arca 2015). He is a fan of the writing of Judith Butler, believing that gender is a performance and that queer artists must break down the notion that sexuality is ‘black and white’ (Arca 2015). He rejects the term ‘alter-ego’ to define Xen, as she is actually a ‘part of me’ that is not restricted by the limitations that ‘clumsy’ language place on defining such an abstract entity (Arca 2015). She is ‘more joyous and messy’ than a mere ‘other me that I'm performing’ (Arca 2015). Xen is a source of inspiration for Arca and his sound encompasses the complex emotions and ambiguities that comprise his relationship to her. He draws on the blurry love–hate relationship that comes from the fact that ‘her mere existence is kind of repulsive and attractive at once’ (Friedlander Reference Friedlander2014).

This begins to reveal why the reviews mentioned above are misguided in their failure to locate emotional resonance in Arca's music. The issues that they criticise in the work – overly digital textures, ‘haphazard’ track sequencing – are in fact critical aspects of the emotionality and personal exploration of self-identity that drives Xen. Arca is of the Post-Internet generation, and has a strong emotional connection to the virtual spaces that he inhabits. As such, the most natural format for him to express the nuances of his inner self is through the highly digital textures that define his work.

Effectively, Xen is a sonic conceptual painting. It is ‘non-representational’ in a traditional sense, but instead offers abstract images of the conflicting emotions that Arca experiences while admiring, rejecting and ultimately embodying his ungendered ‘other’ self. The ‘haphazard’ nature of the album's structure is absolutely intentional. Delicate keyboards clash with aggressive strings and sexualised beats. These confrontational mood-swings and juxtapositions represent fluctuating queer identity, while their digital textures evoke the technological symbioses of Post-Internet existence. As Arca has suggested, the multiplicity of his ‘self’ is not straightforward or constantly enjoyable. It can be painful and it generates many simultaneous contrasting emotions. The instability of Xen – which shifts from beauty, to sorrow, to sexual aggression – reflects the ungraspable nature of identity and gender in a world where Post-Internet audiences inhabit multiple identities simultaneously. Arca asserts that he is inspired by

This evokes both Mykki Blanco's attempts to shed the representational skin of ‘human’ identity and Ryan Trecartin's ‘fleeting ephemeral’ personalities that elude categorisation. If Blanco utilises self-representation to highlight digital queering and Trecartin employs the visual/technological, Xen is the sonic document that most vividly embodies these issues. It is emotional in an abstract way that represents the uncertainties and fluidity of digital queer identity.

The music videos that Jesse Kanda produces for Arca explore similar fluctuations and shifting selves in virtual environments. Arca and Kanda share an ‘intertwined’ relationship, with Kanda asserting that it is ‘like we're a part of each other's DNA’ (Kanda 2014). This telepathic approach sees both artists working naturally in tandem and producing art that evokes comparable themes. Kanda has stated that ‘the Internet and the computer are my school, my paints, and my gallery. What I make today is a direct result of sitting in front of a computer ever since I was allowed to’ (Kanda 2014), signalling the importance that digital culture plays within his art. He formulates visual textures that share in the abstract ambiguities of his friend and is comparably intrigued by the potential for his videos to exhibit extreme emotion.

Videos include themes such as ‘falling in love and the desire to melt into that person [and] violent self-expression and exposure’ (Kanda 2014). The sensitive resonances of these images are always clear, despite the fact that they predominantly forgo conventional ‘storied’ emotion. His art is primarily ‘minimal’ in terms of content – a single figure gracing the centre of the image – instead amplifying the emotional resonances found in colour, texture and motion in ways that are solely expressible through digital animation and enhancement techniques. The clips for ‘Thievery’ and ‘Xen’, for instance, feature Arca's ‘other’ dancing provocatively throughout the entirety of the clips, but a variety of clashing emotions generated by the textures, distortions and coloration of the images themselves (evocative of the album's sonics) turn each film into a journey of sensations and sentiments. In the video named for her, Xen disintegrates and is pulled in multiple directions repeatedly, her image splintering, morphing and attempting to escape the physical form that constrains the many facets of her identity. The immediate reaction that this provokes is one that equates these visuals with the digital queering of Arca's music. Kanda uses primarily digital animation techniques to invoke these fluid and shape-shifting images, embracing methods employed by Ryan Trecartin. It is not just the complexity of queer gender that disrupts the actions and emotions of Xen/Arca. It is also the physical impact of digital technology on her body and, by extension, her identity. It is useful to note here that there is a clear multimodal element to Post-Internet musical production, owing primarily to the intermedial nature of the Internet and its dissolution of boundaries between the audio and the visual. As Herndon puts it, many ‘groundbreaking practitioners get overlooked because they [do not] limit their practice solely to music’ (Herndon 2014). She suggests that:

In other words, Post-Internet music embraces more than just sound. It is thus crucial to study the entirety of an artist's online self-representation to fully comprehend the cyborgian portrait that they present. This is illuminated in Arca and Kanda's collaborative approach. The Post-Internet nature of Arca's jarringly mutable sound is enhanced by Kanda's complementary visuals. The aforementioned images of Xen's splintering self are matched by the intangible changeability of their accompanying tracks. The artists recognise that the sonic juxtapositions of Arca's compositions are likely to be experienced through a device that, inevitably, will feature a screen. As such, his self-conscious digital queering extends into the pieces’ visual presentations. The track ‘Front Load’ from Mutant (Mute 2015) is a cybernetic mixture of glitches, uplifting synthesisers and clicking beats. It is digitality rendered sonic. Yet Kanda's accompanying video is intimate, personal and human. It features the director filming himself naked, focusing on blurry shots of his genitalia and throat as if to reveal every aspect of his physical being, inside and out, regardless of taboo. This audiovisual clash between hyper-organic and hyper-virtual elevates the contrasts of Arca's work beyond purely sound-oriented subversions and into art that is conducive to the Internet's multimodality. Arca uses his ‘online presence’ – including its visual aspects – to enhance his conceptual interests through outlets beyond the sonic.

Performative digital queering

These intermedial themes of malleable identity reached a climax during the artists’ collaborative live tours in 2014/2015. Arca and Kanda produced a multi-layered performance that amplified these themes and rendered them even more abstract and emotive. The first indication of these processes in action was Arca's selection of dress. He emerged onstage in an outfit that played with gender in complex ways: his short, boyish haircut clashing with a pencil skirt, knee-length leather platform boots and Hood By Air-designed shirts. The fashion label Hood By Air, founded by Shayne Oliver, Akeem Smith and Ian Isiah, embodies Post-Internet and digital queer aesthetics, and Arca has praised his influence extensively. He argued that ‘just by existing the way he does [Oliver] inspired a lot of people. … It's crazy to say anyone's at the centre of something, but he's very close to the centre’ of what these artists are doing (Arca, author interview 2015). Oliver is intrigued by the relationship that post-millennial youths have with virtual spaces and has developed an industrial ‘cyberpunk’ aesthetic (Thorne Reference Thorne2014, p. 132) inspired by a collapsing of the boundaries between physical and digital identities. Hood By Air fuses straightjackets, bondage, padlocks, multiple zippers, PVC and leather – all restrictive clothing types – with public street-wear formats such as t-shirts, shorts and jackets. The over-use of metal and plastic elements such as PVC, zippers and padlocks is a reference to ‘wearing’ contemporary technology (Gibb Reference Gibb2011) inspired by the work of industrial musicians in the 1980s/1990s, whose imagery and sounds were similarly preoccupied with machinery (Reed Reference Reed2013). Oliver is making a statement about the inseparable nature of virtual spaces and the organic world. At Hood By Air's 2015 runway season:

These clothes are a self-conscious symbol of the increasing prominence of virtual environments in the ‘real’ world. Technology is inescapable, and Post-Internet audiences are literally ‘wearing’ it when they dress in Hood By Air (and, indeed, even when they do not). Oliver's output is celebrating the symbiotic relationship between these spaces. His clothes are customisable, with removable and additional parts (usually signified by zippers) enabling the wearer to constantly change their look. This is an allusion to notions of mutability and fluidity in Post-Internet identity politics. Hood By Air ‘blurs the lines of race, gender and sexuality’ (Newell-Hanson Reference Newell-Hanson2015) through the production of everyday costumes for an age of identity shape-shifting. Its clothing is built on themes of ‘concealing identity’ and ‘transcending the physical aspects of ourselves that unfortunately divide us’ while exploring the uncanny posthuman imagery associated with twenty-first century ‘surgical beauty’ and ‘faces [that look] sort of altered’ (Singer Reference Singer2015). The label thus has much in common with the mutable nature of Xen. In this visual self-stylisation Arca aligned himself with the Post-Internet work of other digital queer artists, while simultaneously highlighting the ambiguities of his own musical approach. When asked him about his selection of dress, he explained that:

Arca's live image, then, is an attempt to physically embody queer theory. It incorporates both ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ elements into a fluid and ungraspable ‘queer’ identity. Arca's musical set-up featured the same digital instrumentation that defines his record, and at first he took up the traditional position (behind his kit) that typically characterises live presentations of electronic music, understatedly performing the music in tandem with Kanda's visual imagery. However, within the next few tracks the two artists cycled through a number of contrasting and extreme emotions. Kanda's visuals pulled apart the notion of a solid ‘human’ identity in increasingly complex ways, foregrounding images of Xen in various emotional and disintegrative states, while Arca distorted sentimentality by shifting rapidly between gentle piano pieces, dance-inspiring club tracks, surreal collages, and aggressive bursts of static. Finally, Arca climbed in front of the screen onto which Kanda's images were projected and began to perform like the diva that he has proclaimed Xen to be, voguing like a ballroom dancer. The performance was provocatively ambiguous in its execution, ultimately epitomising the Post-Internet style of digital queer.