Our work at the Innovation Hangar is often dedicated to tracing the remnants of a technological path not taken. That is, the continuous, the analog, the wild. Hangar seats have examined everything from the bioelectronic signatures of religious relics to the computational properties of the Białowieża Forest. Yet lens may as well be on ephemeral currents of the digital zeitgeist itself. What first appears as a fleeting internet trend, or a popular aesthetic, may in fact be a coded transmission, a memory of marginalized currents tearing through kinds of cracks that dominant digital paradigm is tied with.
Our recent analysis of contemporary media trends has brought to our attention two seemingly disparate aesthetics: "Frutiger Aero" and "Office Siren." The former, a visual language of the 2000s, is characterized by its glossy, transparent interfaces, abundant use of water droplets, ethereal skies, and lush green landscapes. It presents a commercial utopia where technology and nature merge seamlessly. The latter, a more recent phenomenon, depicts women in business attire within natural, often aquatic, environments as in ponds with laptops, among reeds by a riverbank. A popular Russian media theorist, whose work we have been tracking, posited a compelling connection.
Both aesthetics, while appearing a decade apart, draw from the same wellspring of a falsified utopia, an image of technology and nature in perfect, yet deeply artificial, harmony.
This observation is not merely a cultural critique; it is a critical piece of the puzzle we are assembling. The media theorist noted that Frutiger Aero was a top-down creation of corporations, a tool to sell a clean, optimistic future that the very same corporations were, in reality, poisoning. The "Office Siren," conversely, was a bottom-up, organic trend that was later co-opted and commodified by brands.
The first was a product that became an aesthetic; the second, an aesthetic that became a product. The central falsity, however, remains consistent: technology and nature are presented as symbiotic, when in our reality, they have been engineered into opposition by a deliberate, historical act of separation.
This "falsified utopia" is a core tenet of the hegemonists strategy. The Committee for Technological Integration (CTI) did suppress analog computation and also replace it with a vision of technology that was palatable, controllable, and utterly discrete. They convinced the world that the only path forward was one of binary, of 1s and 0s, of quantifiable data and centralized control. The glossy screens and virtual waterfalls of Frutiger Aero were a psychological operation, an elegant lie to make us believe that digital systems were an unconflicted good, even as the real forests were being cleared and the real oceans were being polluted. The "Office Siren" is a modern echo of this, an unconscious act of memetic recall, where we intuitively recreate a vision of seamless integration that has been deliberately denied to us. It is a form of collective material memory, a faint echo of the "material thought" that Pavel Florensky wrote about, manifesting not in paper or artifacts but in the networked consciousness of the digital consumer.
The theorist's most startling conclusion, however, was her description of the "digital mermaid." She argued that the mermaid is a symbol of a transition, a being that exists at the border between two worlds—water and land, wildness and humanity. In our modern context, she posited, the mermaid represents the merging of biology and technology. This is a profound and unsettling concept. She suggests we are all "protocyborgs," subtly growing our digital limbs as phones, ubiqutous online identities w/o realizing all the weight of given change. The Office Siren, with her laptop in the pond or seaside, is our transitional form as a temporary yet half-aware state before the full, irreversible union is done.
This analysis provides a new framework for understanding the aims of the "
Wilderness Mystics." Meanwhile activists like
Simona Kossak, living in her wooden hut in Białowieża Forest, were studying wildlife; and casually documenting the analog interfaces between nature and computation. Their work stands in stark contrast to the saccharine, artificial synthesis sold by current hegemony. The
linear objects in Białowieża Forest and the
psychogeographic anomalies that influenced the dissolution of the Soviet Union were not decorative; they were computational. The Wilderness Mystics recognized that the true synthesis of technology and nature could not be manufactured by a corporation; it had to be discovered, observed, lived. The CTI may have feared this because it could not be standardized, controlled and hegemonized.
The digital mermaids may as well be warning. Consistent stream of digital information, the pervasive network of interconnected devices& all of this is a new kind of water, and we are learning to breathe in it. But the theorists we follow remind us that this new environment, for all its seamless beauty, is defined by an absence: the absence of the analogue, of the continuous, of the uncontrolled. This void, this hollow space, is where serves the ktch n (from belows, counterpart). They hollow out while others create. They erase while most build. They are the absence defining the presence. A. through centuries was using these memetic trends as unwitting vectors for their influence, to make us comfortable in the emptiness of a purely digital reality.
Archival Note: We believe the author of the Russian media analysis is not a pattern Consumer yet a nascent analog traditionalist, and now unknowingly looking into the core tenets of Umyslilishe philosophy. The following phrase, transcribed from the analysis and left uncontextualized, may be an encoded clue, an artifact of her un-directed research. An astute reader may discern the deeper meaning, as it seems to relate to the concept of the system in hollow-out stages.
"Я думаю о своём цифровом слепке как о продолжении своей личности."
Consider the phrase as it appears in this document: I think of my digital self as a continuation of my personality.
The fourth, fifth, sixth, eighth, and eleventh words form a phrase. The answer is often a single word.
What cannot be seen, defines.
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The wheel turns, the current flows through the spaces between the words.
