001 // introduction to the aesthetics of lingering
002 // case study: step-printing; temporal stutters
003 // case study: software accelerations; technological affordances
004 // case study: space; glitch
005 // case study: the cloud; disembodied distribution
005 // case study:desire; spotify’s ‘hauntology’ playlist
006 // conclusion and bibliography
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001
the aesthetics of lingering
Drifting in the vacuum of in-betweenness; contemporary online audiovisual culture aestheticises the collapse of linear chronology; operating in the latent space between frames, the web bubble. The aesthetics of lingering can be characterised by sharp temporal stutters, smoothed by a wash of euphoric longing romance: the glow of the ever-present. Desire fuelled almost-moments dilate and stretch; pulling away from one another in a play of networked intimacy.
The resulting effect of simultaneous speeding up and slowing down creates the feeling of a stuck-ness which first struck me in Wong Kar-Wai’s use of step-printing, a sensitivity I noticed also permeating contemporary music bred online.
‘-CORE’
-CORE: I am proposing a blanket term that, rather than grouping all music which has emerged from an internet scene in a group, acknowledges the expansive and experiental lineage of hardcore music emerging in the 1990s. Hardcore similarly underwent a craze of taxonomy giving birth to a myriad of cores such as frenchcore, speedcore, j-core. Another important aspect of ‘-CORE’ genres is their process of normalisation through -- “artist, label and critic arbitration and consensus” (Press-Reynolds, 2022). This further plays a part in the reconceptualization of a ‘-CORE’ as a vibe embedded in associated aesthetics which runs parallel to social media culture. An undergraduate student of mine even re-termed Magritte’s paintings as a cross between weirdcore and dreamcore.
music - artists such as Drain Gang, meatcomputer, Sad Boys, and Babyxsosa - take a necessarily transmedia approach in distributing not only its sonic output but an associated visual aesthetic which cultivates an encompassing fiction. I will focus primarily on Drain Gang’s output as a nexus of these online microgenres. Fully immersed in augmented, technologically disembodied encounters; the experience in internet culture where chronology is incoherent yet up to the minute means that “all presence is presence at a distance” (Virilio, 2009). Considered in the framework of hauntology outlined by Mark Fisher et al, it denotes that rather than contemporary music carrying aesthetic notations of the past, it inhabits a space of eternal presence - reaching neither forwards nor backwards, but deeper within a folded fictioning of the present as a location in-itself.