News from the Collective

There’s a moment in Buffy the Vampire Slayer when Buffy — the girl chosen in her generation to protect the world from evil — finally grows up.  Let’s not spoil what might be one of the best-made episodes of the series, an hour of TV saturated with aching despair. Bills start piling up, money becomes short and Buffy can barely make ends meet for herself and her younger sister. With rising debts the destination of being the Slayer seems no longer to be enough to support their living so Buffy decides to start working at the local fast-food chain named the Doublemeat Palace. She finds herself behind the grill, where time becomes slow and all-consuming. The camera-work mirrors this drudgery, shifting from the show’s usual snappy pace into an unbearable, dragging experience — a reflection of the soul-crushing conditions of the wage labor workers reality.

Even when Buffy finishes her shift, she is haunted by the smell of that place: the oil, meat and grease. The odor becomes a constant reminder of a low-income job that she loathes. When she goes to fight the supernatural, to perform what is supposed to be her “destiny job” outside of the wage labor, the smell disturbingly haunts her, making her life’s promised destiny slowly crumble under the weight of dead-end fast-food shifts. Her despair becomes reflected in the transformed relationship with the vampires — in a humor adequate for the series, even the don’t want to bite her anymore.

The smell of the Doublemeat Palace becomes a residue that refuses to be contained within the working hours. Everyone who ever worked next to the frying machine will know that it’s true — you always take the smell of the oil home with you, sticking to your hair, your skin, even your lingerie.

Vampires, as dead beings, crave to feed on blood which is the running, vital stream of life. Buffy however slowly becomes life-less, what is the reflection of her progressing depression. The working conditions at the Doublemeat Palace drain the life out of the Vampire Slayer. The vampires don’t just reject her because of the smell, but because there is not much more life left to steal in the exhausted, alienated worker barely dragging herself home between one shift and another.

For the bulk of the world’s population, working life is dead life, a meaningless waste of time, the realm of alienation, of watching the clock, of yearning for weekends, for vacation, for retirement… work is the realm of anti-magic, a nightmare that weighs heavily on the brain of the living, in which one assumes one’s role in the detailed division of labour, when one obediently fulfills one’s duty as abstract labour, as labour in general, as labour that quantifiable, measurable, indifferent to content, indifferent to the nature of capacities of concrete people.^[1]

 Andy Merrifield, Magical Marxism

 In 2011, the British philosopher Andy Merrifield published Magical Marxism: Subversive Politics and the Imagination — a chronicle of an intellectual attempt to find forms of contemporary Marxism that can break with stagnant materialism and expand into registers that are more imaginative and hopeful. His use of the word “magical” draws less from esoteric and religious traditions, but rather from the logic of magical realism: the project therefore becomes to infect the realism of traditional Marxism with elements that expand it into forms which, at least for now, can only be ascribed to the realm of pure fantasy.

Merrifield’s yearning beyond the confines of realism — and the pessimism that naturally follows from an honest look at what it currently offers — is far from isolated in the modern philosophical thought although it is always met with scoffs and raised eyebrows from those who consider themselves the realest of real Marxists. But the driving impulse of Magical Marxism is not far from Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, Bloch’s The Principle of Hope, or Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: the shared understanding that the performance principle, turned into reality principle — telling us there is “no alternative” — is, to a large extent, a fiction. Imposed on us so that we will be hesitant to hope, hesitant to imagine, hesitant to even peek at what might lie on the other side.

I wonder how many scoffs and raised eyebrows Merrifield invited by ending his book with the suggestion that a butterfly might serve as an apt metaphor for a Marxist. I like to imagine — in some magical-realist register — that Merrifield’s Marxist butterfly shares a kind of kinship with what we now observe under the name of whimsymaxxing: not only because both provoke the same patronizing dismissal, but because both seem animated by a similar spark.

WHIMSY is something in between a live, laugh love GIF, Marxist pamphlet and a distress signal.

Beyond this, whimsy is a vibe, an attitude, an aesthetic and a life-philosophy — one that prioritizes a frivolous orientation toward reality, amplifying a sense of wonder and child-like curiosity in relation to one’s surroundings. The word is usefully slippery: something or someone can be whimsical, but a person can also simply have whimsy, the way one might have SWAG — an ineffable quality that is felt rather than defined. The logic of whimsy moves  through TikTok and other internet platforms through life-hacks like —  how to be more *whimsical*, mood-board displays for whimsical femme lesbian summer ahead, but also life stories, snippets of working conditions and dreams for a life that might be, perhaps, just a little more bearable. What the vibe of whimsy is chasing is the feeling you get after a whole day having a picnic in the sun, eating fruit and laughing with friends. The feeling of lightness and a fullness all at once, a fuzzy warmth that cannot be bought or subscribed to, that can only arise organically — in between circumstances, places and people — the little switch-moment in your brain that, after days of overpowering depressive thoughts, reminds you that life can still be quite freaking beautiful.

In order to recreate these circumstances the logic of whimsy turns towards the figure of the child:

Walking જ⁀➴ Dilly-dally, skipping or cart-wheels.

Eating જ⁀➴ Sow-thistle, grass blades and cookies.

Free time જ⁀➴ Glitter gel, coloring books and exploring the hollows of nearby trees.

Work જ⁀➴ (っ˕ -｡) ᶻ 𝗓

Letty Cole was among the first to theorise whimsy as a cultural phenomenon, in her piece for Polyester Zine.  Beyond its dictionary meaning — strange, playful, humorous behaviour — whimsy had by then become a trending vibe, competing for the New York Times vibe of the year in 2025. Cole located its aesthetic kinship with the phenomenon of twee, reading it as an expression of the urge toward joy and play in nihilistic times. But unlike twee, she argued, whimsy resists being reduced to replicable aesthetic cues — its true aura vanishes the moment it is supposed to become a template. Since Cole published her essay, however, whimsy has accelerated and mutated. Its most visible transformation is linguistic: the participation in whimsy is now often referred to as whimsy-maxxing.

There is of course an irony in this — maxxing as the “snap-on template for ruthless optimization”^[2] applied to something as process-oriented, playful and etheric as whimsy. But I don’t want to devote this essay to that irony. We know that neoliberal capitalism has qualities of the Hydra, which after her head gets chopped, finds a way to grow three more, wearing on them a cap with slogans of the movement she has just devoured. Yet, to write endlessly about the overpowering abilities of this creature would feel like taking away from whoever stands in front of it. Because of that I would like to devote this essay not so much to the Hydra, as to the Whimsy Girl, although — as in every mythological clash perhaps — her existence originates in relation to the monster she faces.

Will You Play With Me?

Andy Merriefield — when drawing the parallel in between a butterfly and a Marxist — believed that the subversive quality of butterflies was its’ ability to roam with the imperative of “avoiding steady forward flight, steady linear advancement”.^[3] The possibility of movement that escapes this imperative can be understood as play, in the sense proposed by the anthropologist Henning Eichberg.

Eichberg too viewed the world as filled with alienation on all fronts: from your surroundings, your colleagues, the fruits of your labour, yourself — the conditions of work as dead life, which makes us closer to the living dead than to the vitality of the living. In that world, he argues, it is play that is capable of creating moments in which those conditions get to be contradicted.^[4] The Whimsy Girl embraces play as a means of disrupting the reality of her alienation.

Life, as we often know it, happens in between beds and laptops, offices and metro stations, or — in a scenario which few years back would feel like a narrative of a dystopian sci-fi — within the four walls of our houses, on Zoom calls, door-dashing food, drinks and entertainment. In such environment moving freely becomes a sense of luxury, because even moving your body — gym, hot yoga, pilates and all like — are governed mostly by the logic of acceleration (maximum results, minim time). To counter that predicament the logic of whimsy creates a space where movement functions as adventure. This is expressed most precisely in whimsy’s varied use of alternative forms of walking, often referencing: dilly-dallying, frolicking, cartwheeling. Forms of movement normally excluded from our daily life, unless in a form of sentimental childhood memories.

The world of the Whimsy Girl caters to that unlimited possibility of movement: there are no walls, no boundaries — what lies after the next hill is a question to be answered only when you cross it. If you need shelter, there is always the hollow of a tree, the ruin of a castle or the little cabin with dimmed lights and a fireplace where you can rest before departing on a further adventure. This natural world is not idealized in the way we have seen with trends like cottage-core, where an entire aesthetic was built around a city-dweller’s pastoral idea of village life — linen dresses, strawberry picking and star-gazing with your loved one before going to bed. The imaginary of whimsy reaches further — towards the registers of the fantastical, borrowing from realms we normally associate with the unreal. This is the logic’s quiet demand: not a return to nature, but a step toward a world that doesn’t yet exist, but towards which we can begin to depart.

The realm of fairy tale, magic and imagination has historically served as a space of possibility for subverting the familiar forms of social organization.^[5] What might become useful here is Henry Corbin’s distinction between the imaginary and the imaginal based on Sufi texts. The imaginary refers to fantasy as escapism, but the imaginal — names a form of imagination capable of producing new worlds.^[6] If the cottage-core imagination of village life was a withdrawing fantasy, Whimsy Girl’s pull towards the landscape of the fairy-tales is rather an orientation toward the imaginal: a search for forms of life that do not yet exist within the coordinates of contemporary social reality, but which urgently needs to arise.

Yet this capacity for playful alteration is not limited just to the relation to one’s body or surroundings. If dilly-dallying is the bodily refusal of linear advancement or fantasy a refusal of current spatial organization, humor could be understood as its mental equivalent. Just as the Marxist butterfly which evades steady forward flight, humor becomes a tool in producing discourses which can challenge consensus reality. We can observe this on the example of the strategic placement of the word whimsy within visibly un-whimsy scenarios — such as a “dead-end” jobs in retail or hospitality.

The contrast between the symbolic weight of that word and the conditions to which it applies does not merely produce irony, but enacts a form of playful subversion: the promise of whimsy clashes violently with the deadening logic of this labor. The joke works because the viewer already feels that something is wrong, that the reality is somewhat miserable and alienating. It works because the audience themselves have worked at the grill of the Doublemeat Palace. In laughing, they become not just passive observers but unwitting comrades.

The same relational playfulness is extended through self-infantilization. Drawing from the figure of the child the Whimsy Girl creates a playful contrast which reveals to us the absurdity of the outside world and its’ unjust structures. The Whimsy Girl reminds us: consider who is being asked to submit to forty hours of weekly labour: not a rational economic agent, not a productive unit, but me — a tiny bunny. Wide-eyed, big-eared, gazing into the river with an expression caught somewhere between hope and oblivion. By rendering herself as something so incongruously small and soft, she exposes the violence of the demand placed upon her.

The Silly Girl Walked, so that the Whimsy Girl Could Frolic

Mela Miekus and Mita Medri have already described self-infantilization as a tactic of online girlhood with their Silly Girl theory: notoriously disorganized, slightly delusional and convincingly cute AF. In their essay The Silly Girl Theory: Scrolling the Digital Playgrounds they describe her through these words:

She learned from the weaponized incompetence of her boyfriends and uses her own tactical passivity to essentially reap the benefits of patriarchal assumptions of her weakness and vulnerability. If she’s so incapable, if she’s so clueless, then we should really just give her a break already. […] Silly Girl milks this assumption that she is incompetent, to lower expectations, and get others to cut her some slack when she turns a little devious. She’s too cute to understand, so how can she really be held accountable for her actions? ^[7]

 There is something adjacent here to logic of whimsy: a tactical use of lightness, of non-seriousness, within a system that demands constant productivity and self-optimization. Those behind the whimsymaxxing hashtag on TikTok — just like the Silly Girl — don’t want to adjust to the rules of the game created by big corporate boys, as they were born to be forest fairies in a world that forces them to work. But the Whimsy Girl does no longer feel the need to relate to her femininity, her girlhood, in the way the Silly Girl had to — her way of communicating with the world is not based on inciting desire.

The Silly Girl was a jestress, a trickstress — and very much a coquette. In her methods of survival and emancipation, she put on cloaks and deceived, bended boundaries and realities. The Whimsy Girls however has freed herself from the expectations that still applied to her predecessor — she functions not as an object of desire, but perhaps as an expression of something pre-sexual and much more gender-fluid: like auras or balls of energy.

Where the Silly Girl dealt the cards through her flirt and wit, the Whimsy Girl just leaves the table.

 Exiting the (Girl) Cave

Perhaps she’s naive but the Whimsy Girl doesn’t want to live inside of the (girl) cave anymore — she has grown up there, watching generations of girls before her doom-scrolling, mistaking shadow projections for what’s real. The Whimsy Girl wants to step outside and face the reality in its fullness — she needs to lie on the forest floor and be absorbed back into the earth.

 Those who are currently whimsymaxxing — mostly girls in their teenage years and twenties — are the generation raised in the midst of the pandemic of the Beige Girl: slick bun on her head, monochromatic sweatpants set, an “aesthetic” journaling corner, pantry shelves manically reorganized every weekend so that every spice jar has its own label, a 12-step skincare routine, a 12-3-30 treadmill workout, and a 9-to-5 at a corporate job. The life of these girls was a life of exhaustion, numbered rules, and a hyper-organized approach to reality — the Beige Girl was an episode of glorified OCD dressed in the most mundane of colors. Memories of such forms of girlhood stick to the skin of the Whimsy Girl like a spider web, making her paranoid and claustrophobic, craving to see what life has to offer beyond the shadow play.

The urge toward the outside world arrives as a natural reaction after years spent on the inside: inside the web, inside the house during the pandemic, and — perhaps most importantly — inside oneself. The years of enforced interiority produced their own dominant discourse: the psychologizing turn, which equipped us, for better and for worse, with a linguistic toolkit for discussing our inner traumas between a cigarette and a latte. One of its ruling approaches was the reconnection with your inner child — a TikTok-inflected reading of Jungian philosophy that became, for a time, almost inescapable. The child within us was hugged, her hair brushed, put to bed under pink and fluffy sheets, smooched on the forehead for a goodnight. The adult self gave her everything her parents couldn’t — often by creating the economic conditions to take the girl within herself for fun and treats, filling every childhood wound with self-love and careful attention.

Yet the nurtured inner child, once safely contained as an object of introspective care, begins to exceed the boundaries of private repair. She is no longer within us — she becomes us, devours us, this time in a disruptive Dionysian sense. She has escaped the interior and now exists in the world. The problem is that the world’s structures are not to her liking. She was promised beautiful sunsets, barefoot walks through the forests and afternoons playing with her peers — hope, joy and the possibility of play.

What she meets on the other side is a laptop, a pile of bills, and the Double Meat palace.

In return, the Whimsy Girl becomes the externalized Inner Child who no longer seeks comfort within the self but demands a world capable of sustaining non-instrumental life. She is born where the Inner Child reaches her limits, where she gets pushed out of the womb, this time healed and demanding a world compatible with her existence. The Inner Child had designated days and activities which were supposed to create an environment for her to heal, but the logic of whimsy seems to requests something different. She shows us that the primary problem is not that the adult must comfort the child, but that the child introduces desires incompatible with the current form of social organization to which all of the adults seem to conform.

 The Whimsy Girl and a Bunch of Old Neurotics

Carl Jung recognized, alongside the Inner Child, a distinct and older archetype: the Divine Child. Where the Inner Child is biographical — formed through the particularity of one’s own childhood, shaped by specific wounds and losses — the Divine Child is atemporal and universal, belonging to no one in particular and therefore, in equal measure, to everyone. It emerges at moments of historical rupture, when old systems have exhausted themselves and something not yet nameable is pressing to be born. It does not look backward toward lost innocence but forward toward a form of life that does not yet exist, though its outline is already felt as an absence.

The Divine Child is fragile. Jung was clear about this: the newborn is always endangered — especially from within. In the Christian mythological structure, this danger appears as Herod — the force that seeks to kill the new before it can grow and, as Jung reminds us, that “…Herod, the one who wants to keep things as they are, no matter how bad, lives within us”.^[8] In psychological terms, Jung named this force neurosis: the compulsive repetition of exhausted patterns, the inability to tolerate the uncertainty of becoming something other than what one already is. Here the genealogy of digital girlhood becomes legible as a sequence of neurotic figures. The Sad Girl, the Girl Boss, the Beige Girl — each, in her own way, a Herod figure.

The danger in this story might not be just the Hydra, but that the Whimsy Girl will give away to the force of her inner Herod: that the imaginary will devour the potential of the imaginal.

My mother once told me that during my early teenage years, she found me crying on the bathroom floor, entering some weird level of existential psychosis and suffering because, as I told her, “I couldn’t understand whether I’m an adult or a child”. I don’t remember much of it, just the faint emotional residues of that transformation — but some instinct tells me the Whimsy Girl suffers from a similar confusion. She exists suspended between two pulls.

The first one is the pull of the Inner Child: imaginary, force of the internal, the sphere of private suffering.

The second one is the pull of the Divine Child: imaginal, force of the external, the sphere of the collective suffering, which becomes the push towards the world that doesn’t yet exist.

The Whimsy Girl lives at the unstable threshold between these two states. Her attraction toward play contains genuine imaginal potential. Yet “play is rarely about results” and perhaps, because of this, its’ transformation into historical force can be quite demanding. In 2013, when describing the failure of counterculture of the 60s and the 70s, Mark Fisher argued that “… story of how the counterculture was co-opted by the neoliberal Right is now a familiar one, but the other side of this narrative is the Left’s incapacity to transform itself in the face of the new forms of desire to which the counterculture gave voice”.^[9]

Today we meet the Whimsy Girl at similar crossroads.

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Bio

Helena Łomnicka is a researcher and writer with a background in Cultural Analysis and an MA in the History of Esotericism. Her research most often meets at the intersection of pop-culture, critical theory and modern esoteric discourse. She’s currently based in Warsaw, Poland.

Notes

^[1] Merrifield, Andy, Magical Marxism: Subversive Politics and the Imagination, London: Pluto Press, 2011, p. 42

^[2] Madsen, Dag Øivind, Containment Failure and the Diffusion of Fringe Masculinity: The Case of Clavicular, SSRN Working Paper, 2026, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6504320, p.3

^[3] Merrifield, Andy, Magical Marxism: Subversive Politics and the Imagination, London: Pluto Press, 2011, p. 185

^[4] Eichberg, Henning, ‘Play against alienation?’, in Wendy Russell, Emily Ryall and Malcolm MacLean (eds) The Philosophy of Play as Life, London: Routledge, 2018, p. 218

^[5] Zipes, Jack, ‘Breaking the Magic Spell: Politics and the Fairy Tale’, New German Critique 6 (Autumn 1975), pp. 116–135, p.133. http://www.jstor.org/stable/487657

^[6] Janion, Maria, ‘Towards a Phantasmatic Criticism’, in Knowledge in the Shadow of Catastrophe: Key Thinkers of Polish Humanities in the Post-War Era, Brill | Schöningh, 2024, https://brill.com/display/book/9783657793952/BP000020.xml, p. 207

^[7]  Miekus, Mela and Medri, Mita, ‘The Silly Girl Theory: Scrolling the Digital Playgrounds’, Institute of Network Cultures, 2024. https://networkcultures.org/longform/2024/01/22/the-silly-girl-theory-scrolling-the-digital-playgrounds/.

^[8]  Wesley, Deborah, ‘The Divine Child’, Psychological Perspectives 62:4, 2019, p. 259

^[9] Fisher, Mark, ‘“A social and psychic revolution of almost inconceivable magnitude”: Popular Culture’s Interrupted Accelerationist Dreams’, e-flux journal 46, June 2013. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/46/60084/a-social-and-psychic-revolution-of-almost-inconceivable-magnitude-popular-culture-s-interrupted-accelerationist-dreams/.

References

Bloch, Ernst, The Principle of Hope, trans. N. Plaice, S. Plaice and P. Knight, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986 .

Cole, Letty, ‘Chaotic Good: Is Whimsy the Vibe Shift That Can Save Us?’, Polyester, 28 May 2024. https://www.polyesterzine.com/features/chaotic-good-is-whimsy-the-vibe-shift-that-can-save-us

Eichberg, Henning, ‘Play against alienation?’, in Wendy Russell, Emily Ryall and Malcolm MacLean (eds) The Philosophy of Play as Life, London: Routledge, 2018, pp. 211–226.

Fisher, Mark, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Winchester: Zero Books, 2009.

Fisher, Mark, ‘“A social and psychic revolution of almost inconceivable magnitude”: Popular Culture’s Interrupted Accelerationist Dreams’, e-flux journal 46, June 2013. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/46/60084/a-social-and-psychic-revolution-of-almost-inconceivable-magnitude-popular-culture-s-interrupted-accelerationist-dreams/.

Maria Janion, ‘Towards a Phantasmatic Criticism’, in Katarzyna Bojarska, Ewa Domańska, Piotr Filipkowski, Jacek Małczyński and Luiza Nader (eds), Knowledge in the Shadow of Catastrophe: Key Thinkers of Polish Humanities in the Post-War Era, Paderborn: Brill | Schöningh, 2024, pp. 207–232.

Madsen, Dag Øivind, ‘Containment Failure and the Diffusion of Fringe Masculinity: The Case of Clavicular’, unpublished draft, 9 April 2026.

Marcuse, Herbert, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, London: Routledge, 1998

Merrifield, Andy, Magical Marxism: Subversive Politics and the Imagination, London: Pluto Press, 2011.

Miekus, Mela and Medri, Mita, ‘The Silly Girl Theory: Scrolling the Digital Playgrounds’, Institute of Network Cultures, 2024. https://networkcultures.org/longform/2024/01/22/the-silly-girl-theory-scrolling-the-digital-playgrounds/.

O’Luanaigh, Robin, ‘Co-opting Cottagecore: Pastoral Aesthetics in Reactionary and Extremist Movements’, GNET, 19 May 2023. https://gnet-research.org/2023/05/19/co-opting-cottagecore-pastoral-aesthetics-in-reactionary-and-extremist-movements/.

Wesley, Deborah, ‘The Divine Child’, Psychological Perspectives 62:4, 2019, pp. 446–454.

Prosfygika, a powerful example of an urban common. It must be supported. Silvia Federici, May 2026 I did not know about Prosfygika. Thus, when some feminist friends, knowing my interest in the construction of commons, suggested a visit to it, I imagined we would go to a squatted building. I did not expect to find […]

(Dutch below)

From September on INC will be an autonomous entity, leaving the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences behind. This phase will present us with both challenges and exciting new opportunities. As INC will become an association with members, we are currently looking for 3 board members. The board will meet about 4 times a year to develop and monitor the association’s strategy. 

Alongside the general board members, we are specifically looking for a:

• Chair: Provides overall leadership to the board and facilitates meetings.
• Secretary: Oversees board administration, including scheduling meetings, preparing agendas, taking minutes, and ensuring proper documentation.
• Treasurer: Monitors the financial health of the association, oversees and manages budgeting, reporting, taxes, and advises the board on financial strategy and sustainability. Knowledge of the Dutch landscape in this context is important.

The people in these three roles will determine the direction and first steps of the association, and will truly help shape its core – both practically and strategically. The people in these roles will perform small ongoing tasks to keep the board running. An estimate would be 8 hours a month, but this is also something that they would decide on together and can adjust accordingly based on the decided strategies. 

The board members will work voluntarily and are legally not allowed to do paid work for the association’s projects. Proficiency in spoken and written Dutch is preferred. 

Please send your CV and a short motivation to info@networkcultures.org if you are interested in one of these three roles. 

//

Vanaf september zal INC een zelfstandige organisatie worden en niet langer onderdeel zijn van de Hogeschool van Amsterdam. Deze nieuwe fase brengt zowel uitdagingen als interessante nieuwe mogelijkheden met zich mee. Omdat INC een vereniging met leden wordt, zijn wij momenteel op zoek naar 3 bestuursleden. Het bestuur zal ongeveer 4 keer per jaar bijeenkomen om de strategie van de vereniging te ontwikkelen en te monitoren.

Naast algemene bestuursleden zijn wij specifiek op zoek naar een:

De mensen in deze drie functies zullen de richting en de eerste stappen van de vereniging bepalen en daadwerkelijk helpen bij het vormgeven van de kern van de organisatie — zowel praktisch als strategisch. Daarnaast voeren zij kleine doorlopende taken uit om het bestuur goed te laten functioneren. De geschatte tijdsinvestering is ongeveer 8 uur per maand, maar dit zullen zij gezamenlijk bepalen en indien nodig aanpassen op basis van de gekozen strategieën.

De bestuursleden werken op vrijwillige basis en mogen wettelijk geen betaald werk verrichten voor projecten van de vereniging. Beheersing van de Nederlandse taal in woord en geschrift heeft de voorkeur.

Ben je geïnteresseerd in een van deze drie functies? Stuur dan je cv en een korte motivatie naar info@networkcultures.org.

Max, a young and ambitious researcher, travels to Svalbard, Norway, to speak at a conference on the ethics of mind enhancement. There, she discovers a high-tech experimental building powered by “Dual Resolve,” a system that harvests human body heat. As the conference unfolds, the warmth of bodies and the pressure of ideas begin to blur, pulling Max into a state of growing uncertainty where thought and sensation are no longer discernible.

In her first novel, published by Set Margins’ in Eindhoven, Morgane Billuart combines an unyielding Arctic darkness and media critique to explore the boundaries between physical reality and technological innovation.

Book extract: “Promptly, without introducing herself, another participant raised her hand, slowly moving toward the microphone before spitting out a few words: “I’m sorry, but in such a world, how do you know what you should believe and shouldn’t trust?”

The speaker remained quiet. After flexing his finger next to his mouth a few times, he reached for the microphone and claimed, while staring directly at Max: “You pay very close attention to your body and your daily senses. The body does not know how to lie to you. Pay very little attention to your mind. It is lying to you. All the time.”

Book launches in Berlin, Amsterdam, and Vienna will be announced soon. You can order the book here: https://www.setmargins.press/books/the-heat-of-others/. More information on the author’s website: https://morganebilluart.com/.

Set Margins’ also published Morgane Billuart’s first two non-fiction books, Cycles, the Sacred and the Doomed and Becoming the Product.

 

 

By Xiaoquan (Chelsea) Zhong

In Art and the After-Culture, Ben Davis suggests that visual art in the age of the after-culture is increasingly diverging into three distinct tendencies.[1] Following his line of thought, I have tried to identify three corresponding artistic cases that resonate with these categories. Before rushing to define it, it might be more meaningful to first observe what is being recognized as art in our current context. With this in mind, I turn to three cases in an attempt to render Ben Davis’s three trends more tangible and perceptible.

Art institutions oriented toward middle-class leisure consumption had a good run as purveyors of contemporary adult theme-park attractions, integrated into an increasingly fluid and mobile world of “experience”- based technological leisure.

This is tendency A.

I chose teamLab as a case for tendency A which is both representative and, in many ways, extreme. teamLab (founded in 2001) is an international art collective. Their collaborative practice seeks to navigate the confluence of art, science, technology, and the natural world. This immensely popular digital art collective is devoted to immersive exhibitions, bringing together artists, animators, architects, programmers, and other specialists to construct intricate, multi-sensory environments. Today, teamLab has expanded across the globe, with major sites such as teamLab Planets TOKYO and teamLab Borderless in Tokyo. Beyond standalone exhibitions, their works have also entered institutional contexts through collaborations with organizations like the National Gallery of Victoria and Pace Gallery.

 

I find it difficult to articulate exactly what these exhibitions are “about.” Perhaps this elusiveness is precisely their defining quality—they operate through abstraction, demanding to be experienced rather than explained. Or perhaps content itself has become secondary; viewers may willingly overlook meaning, focusing instead on the act of visiting and the intensity of the visual encounter. You must browse their website and be overwhelmed by its dazzling imagery, but it is only through physical presence that one truly begins to grasp the experience.

In tracing immersive exhibitions, I noticed that even those centered on Vincent van Gogh alone have proliferated in the Netherlands in various forms. For instance, the Van Gogh Immersive Experience Utrecht and Fabrique des Lumières in Amsterdam-West both present such projects. Van Gogh and Rembrandt in Amsterdam promotes itself as “an immersive experience in Amsterdam unlike any other, and an unforgettable journey that stimulates all your senses[2].” This leads to the broader question surrounding immersive art: is it merely a fleeting display of technological spectacle[3]?

Recently, I visited an immersive exhibition space in Amsterdam with a friend, though the experience was far from satisfying. We went with expectations created by the intricate, enigmatic visual world of Hieronymus Bosch,[4] thinking that it could not be better to enter his surreal and densely constructed pictorial universe. However, the reality was disappointing. The so-called ‘mmersive’ experience consisted merely of a few poorly splicing projection screens. On the positive side, we were shown a detailed interpretative video of Bosch’s works; yet, all the videos were  AI-generated (obviously). I remain somewhat skeptical of this approach. For an exhibition that relies on moving images as an experiential medium, such a fully AI-driven production process seems to significantly weaken the audience’s  emotional resonance. The only moment that felt genuinely engaging was a brief VR headset experience included in the ticket.

I am not attempting to critique immersive exhibitions as such. I remain curious about and open to those I have yet to encounter. This is precisely why I believe the ‘presence’ of immersive experiences is so important, as well as their inherent uncertainty—you never truly know what kind of sensation they promise until you are physically there.

If we trace its development backward from today’s most popular forms of digital art, it becomes clear that almost all contemporary artistic practices are shaped by a crucial shift from “object” to “concept.” Since then, art no longer emphasizes the materiality of the object, and increasingly questions the institutions and systems of the art world. 

This type of art provides the basis for status networks to cement a common ruling-class sense of identity and destiny. Secret rituals and private emblems, deliberately inaccessible to a broad public, reanimating the sense of personal mission for the entitled – art lives on in this way.

 This is tendency B.

When it comes to the second trend, the first example that comes to mind is the conceptual work Comedian[5] which is a fresh banana duct taped to the wall. Even if this isn’t a perfectly suitable example, Comedian cleverly reveals how this mechanism works. To the average audience, it seems utterly absurd; however, for those within it, the work reveals the representative characteristics of a “shared esoteric code.” Created in 2019 by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, the piece was released in an edition of three. Two were sold for $120,000 each at Art Basel, while the third reached $150,000.

What provoked even greater discussion than the work itself is the absurd chain of events surrounding its central element—the banana. Originally purchased for just 25 cents each from a fruit vendor in New York City, Shah Alam, the banana has since been repeatedly “consumed” across contexts. In 2023, at the Leeum Museum of Art, a student visitor casually ate it without consequence. In 2024, the work was auctioned for $6.2 million to the cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun, who also proceeded to eat it . As a result, the Centre Pompidou-Metz remarked that, for now, it may well be “the most-eaten artwork of the last 30 years[6].”

 Unexpectedly, I encountered a curious coincidence last week at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, however, it is Yes! We Have No Bananas, which is a work of Barbara Visser’s exhibition Superposition. In it, she references Comedian by Maurizio Cattelan and replaces the banana with a sketchbook by the Dutch painter Isaac Israëls.[7]

What intrigued me was that, when I later searched for the work online, the image shown on her website, featuring a sketchbook page taped to the wall, which looked entirely different from what I had seen in the museum. As I tried to make sense of this discrepancy, I revisited the exhibition label I had photographed, only to realize that the piece on display was in fact Yes! We Have No Bananas II, marked as a “unique piece.”[8]

Like that “banana”. At this point, the superposition of concepts, the superposition of originals and reproductions, the layering of creations, between authorship, reproduction and interpretation, sparks a renewed reflection on art.

Culture can only re-form once again in secret, in coalition with a fresh carde of the oppressed, keeping the memory of the broken struggles alive. Artists be in to invent anew, despite the unsparing spectacle of repression.

 This is tendency C.

For the third trend, I want to foreground practices of artistic resistance. I chose the Canton-based collective BOLOHO . It began in 2019 from a very concrete and immediate need that two women sought to carve out a space where they could momentarily step outside existing structures. With the gradual involvement of others, this initial impulse evolved into a collaborative structure embedded within a community. In an old residential neighborhood in Guangzhou, they established a loosely organized yet continuously operating platform under the model of a “business,” reweaving work and life, the individual and the collective, sustained through principles of equality, self-discipline, and mutual support.

Their attention turns to forms of labour that are constantly absorbed into daily life yet rarely acknowledged—cooking, planting, sewing, caregiving[9], and cohabitation. Rather than producing clearly defined artistic outcomes, their practice repeatedly circles around a question: within the constraints of reality, how can people still work and live together, and in doing so, generate new forms of relation?

In Cantonese BOLOHO refers to the seed of a jackfruit—a part often discarded, yet still edible. The name itself operates as a metaphor for their methodology: to rediscover overlooked values and transform them into new resources through collective labour.

At documenta fifteen, the concept of “lumbung” was proposed by ruangrupa,[10] a concept that reoriented artistic production toward shared resources and the reorganization of social relations. BOLOHO was invited to Kassel in 2022, where they created a space combining food, labour, and moving image. Their mini-sitcom BOLOHOPE, along with collective drawing and temporary dining practices, intertwined humor with everyday experience, positioning art not as something to be viewed, but as a structure to be lived.

They also curated and edited The BOLOHO Series, bringing together one-minute films by 18 artists and filmmakers from around the world. The project stems from the The One Minutes initiative by Het Nieuwe Instituut—a global platform linking experimental video and art education, compressing and activating expression within an extremely short temporal frame.

In 2024, their “Seed to Textile[11]” project at CHAT (Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile) further extended this practice into the social realm. Using overseas Chinese farms as an entry point, they traced histories of Hong Kong migration and plant circulation since the 1950s, weaving together agriculture, textiles, and memory. Participants, including audiences, students, and community members, were drawn into collaborative processes ranging from planting and dye-making to sewing, video production, and performance. Each form of participation engages with questions of identity, cultural inheritance, and emotional connection.

Walter Benjamin writes: “The mass is a matrix from which all traditional behavior toward works of art issues today in a new form.”[14] The general public tends to seek entertainment in artworks, whereas others approach them with focused attention and contemplation. “Clearly, this is at bottom the same ancient lament.”[15] Whether we are the general public or art enthusiasts is no longer a clearly defined distinction in the after-culture. It could be lying back on a soft beanbag in an immersive exhibition space, or booking a day ticket just to be part of Art Basel, or a resident in Guangzhou dropping by the third-floor BOLOHO living room on a leisurely afternoon, fanning themselves and having tea, like a daily neighborhood chat as usual.Each of these is simply one possible way of being.

—

Notes:

[1] In Art in the After-Culture (Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2022), Ben Davis argues that “what used to be called ‘visual art’ has today split into three distinct tendencies”. After-culture is “the mode of cultural production and consumption related to the new pattern of political and economic power that has consolidated in the wake of the last decade’s turbulence.” https://www.benadavis.com/after-culture

[2] Van Gogh and Rembrandt in Amsterdam, immersive exhibition: https://vangoghinamsterdam.com/en.

[3]Media studies scholar Huang has published an article titled “Is Immersive Art a Buzzword, or an Essential ‘Innovative Concept’?”, in which she critically examines the current proliferation of immersive art practices and questions whether they represent a meaningful artistic paradigm or merely a contemporary cultural buzzword. https://mag.clab.org.tw/clabo-article/immersive-art/

[4] Hieronymus Bosch, was a prolific Dutch painter of the 15th and 16th centuries. Most of his paintings depict sin and the decline of human morality. Bosch used demons, half-human, half-beast figures, and even machines to represent human evil. His paintings are complex, highly original, imaginative, and make extensive use of various symbols and allegories.

[5] Comedian, a 2019 artwork by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. Created in an edition of three https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedian_(artwork)

[6] Centre-Pompidou Metz said in the statement, https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/21/style/maurizio-cattelan-banana-eaten-again-scli-intl

[7] Isaac Israëls (1865-1934), a Dutch painter associated with the Amsterdam Impressionism movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Isra%C3%ABls

[8] As the exhibition label shows: Yes! We have no bananas today II, 2026 – Sketchbook. duct tape – Unique piece – Courtesy of the artist – Sketches by Isaac Israels.

[9] Artists-in-Residence 2024 BOLOHO, on The Mill 6 Chat website,  https://www.mill6chat.org/zh-hant/artist/2024-boloho

[10] ruangrupa, a collective founded in 2000 and based in Jakarta, Indonesia, is a non-profit organization. https://documenta-fifteen.de/en/about/

[11] Seed to Textile, a community programme launched by CHAT, To explore the intrinsic relationship between textiles and the environment. https://www.themills.com.hk/en/event/seed-to-textile-2024-boloho-open-studio/

[12] Each textile dons a different design and photograph. Five unique scarves in total, each sold separately. https://www.printedmatter.org/catalog/67330/

[13] Article about BOLOHO at Documenta Fifteen 2022 and Art Basel Hong Kong 2023 https://www.theartjournal.cn/archives/exhibitions/95705

[14] Quotes from The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin.

[15] Ibid.

This Can’t be the Place: Alternative Theories of the Internet is the latest INC reader featuring a selection of INC Longform’s from the past five years. You can read it online, download it as a PDF, or order it for free at home.

Fragments of Tactical Media is the new INC reader part of the Etherport series. You can read it online, download it as a PDF, or order it for free at home.

It is July 4, 2025. The air is hot; the sun is beaming on concrete and asphalt. Sweat is accumulating on my cotton Disrupt band t-shirt. My skin is sticky. Inside a suffocating room, the volume penetrating my ears is the racket of voices producing a steady pulsation of disunified sounds. A brown noise. In a studio room in Boyle Heights, the acoustics create a space-time of rebellious gravity. There’s something gestating. We are in that in-between aural space, the time-lag between speaker, musician, or performance. The MC is letting the crowd know what is next. We all desired to know.

Yaotl—the vocalist of Xicano hip-hop/punk group Aztlán Underground—is the MC. He is speaking to the crowd during that transition to the next set. Doing so, Yaotl used this exact instance to identify the political moment we were all witness to, the historical cause for the event here, and then, surprising everyone, facilitated a collective llanto. He called it “scream therapy.” The dignified cry, as I am calling it, for him, is sticky, piercing, and angry—a sonorous form of dignified rage. We are all here for Xican@ Records and Film annual cultural event, the Farce of July that hosts vendors and musicians. Yaotl readies the crowd, his contagious call for a llanto also fused with the intimate violences of coloniality, what decolonial theorists of modernity, such as semiotician Walter Mignolo, have called its darker side or underside. “I want everyone to scream your fucking rage against all this shit.” He counts to three. One. Two. Three. We scream. We yell. We cry and cry out together. We manifest the sound of el llanto.

Gritos, llantos, sonidos, caos, and roncas are not new in Latinx Sound Studies. Their history, particularly in Latinx cultural studies, is intimate with the genealogy of not only musical or popular cultural forms (think rancheras in Mexico) but ancestral ceremony, rituals, and mythic stories (like La Llorona). From the invasion of Mexico-Tenochtitlan by Cortés in 1519 to the sonic protest of the 2018 Llanto Colectivo against the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego, we can adequately identify the historically loud opposition against racism and coloniality in the United States. I explore the function of el llanto in relationship to a generalized response to the fascist sequences of repression emerging in the United States, showing how llantos orient both the listener and participant toward a discernment of grief and catharsis. This twofold function facilitates an embodied practice of corporeal sound-making and its therapeutic effect, which I ground here as a form of affective suture. Suffering, transmuted into coraje (angry-tinged courage), generates a collective sounding that pulls listeners into the acoustic llanto. In doing so, it transforms the listener into an agent of dignified rage.

Theorizing llantos requires a Latinx sound and listening methodology grounded in sonic phenomenology—drawing from phenomenological and sound studies traditions—that develop an “acoustic perception” sensitive to the “sonic environment.” I contribute to the notes toward a Latinx listening methodology introduced by Wanda Alarcón, Dolores Inés Casillas, Esther Díaz Martín, Sara Veronica Hinojos, and Cloe Gentile Reyes, who affirm faithful listening as, “attuned not only to sound, but to histories, structures, and acts of refusal that resist dehumanization.” Historically, phenomenologists have privileged the visual phenomenal field, the primacy of visuality being the ocular sense to discern or disclose the meaning of consciousness and lived experience. The sonic phenomenologist tunes into the soundscape as the totality of the aural experience.

The sonic phenomenologist of el llanto, or the dignified cry, develops a decolonial listening technique to perceive the aural structure of coloniality, the audition of dispossession mediated by anti-migrant animus, and the desire for emancipation from such sonic hauntings in everyday life. Many who let out a llanto do so in the face of anti-immigrant, anti-Latinx racism. It emerges as a vocal response to coloniality as lived and enforced through everyday regimes of racialized governance, from linguistic profiling and labor precarity to the slow violence of immigration delay and the spectacle of public kidnappings.

The collective llanto in July came at a time when in Los Angeles, California a popular revolt broke out in the early days of June amongst dissenters against I.C.E. raids and the Trump administration’s deployment of the National Guard to the streets. The spectacle, of a Xicano hip-hop/punk ensemble inviting a collective llanto, became much more than the cacophony of discordant screams but the dissensus of an aggrieved community. In their grief, mediated by the capture, detainment, and transport of undocumented migrants to detention centers, the catharsis of a llanto fueled the connection between desire and social movement. The sounds exiting the body, resonating as vibration in a shared room, identified the mutual feelings of others, in the exhalation of a noisy, impulsive breath.

This was not euphoria.

This instance of a rageful cry—loud, infectious, piercing – builds on the “faithful witnessing” articulated by María Lugones and Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez, disclosing collective anguish fused with a tender fury. The listener must resist the organization of the dignified cry as melodic, rhythmic, or joyful. Rather, the llanto disturbs, ruptures, and erupts as a thunderous dissonance. Its saturation of auditory space interrupts the experience of conviviality or seriality and enchants the temporal form of the ensemble where the participants disappear behind the guttural and raucous sounds.

Faithful listening not only decolonizes racializing sonic structures but amplifies resistance, revolt, and coraje. Llantos are spontaneous, organized, lived. To voice el llanto is to become el llanto; an affective suture where a new auditory imaginary links with the Xicanacimiento of Yaotl’s specificity. Llantos, thus, are particular vocal moments continually shaped and fashioned. For the critical Latinx listener, el llanto offers a few seconds of catharsis and collective grief.

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Featured Image: Aztlan Underground en Tenochtitlán by Flickr User Joél Martínez CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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Kristian E. Vasquez is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research on the affects, performances, sounds, and semiosis of La Xicanada expands the concept of Xicanacimiento, centering the aesthetic force of expressive cultural forms in California.

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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig: 

Boom! Boom! Boom!: Banda, Dissident Vibrations, and Sonic Gentrification in Mazatlán—Kristie Valdez-Guillen

Listening to MAGA Politics within US/Mexico’s Lucha Libre –Esther Díaz Martín and Rebeca Rivas

Ronca Realness: Voices that Sound the Sucia Body—Cloe Gentile Reyes 

Echoes in Transit: Loudly Waiting at the Paso del Norte Border Region—José Manuel Flores & Dolores Inés Casillas