#21: Delirious
This week: What Demon Slayer tells us about digital aesthetics // The first two major books on NFTs // Smart rings and the untapped power of creative data
This week we’re going back to an area I find super-interesting - what some of the weirdest most super-popular edges of digital culture tell us about tomorrow’s art and creativity. Today it’s anime and sludge posts on social media, before it’s been memes and music.
Inside this strange brew, something very new is emerging.
Plus we’ll look at new books on NFTs and a new consumer technology device category that’s coming fast down the line.
Let’s go.
Thanks to a whole bunch of new paid subscribers from last week’s RECAP edition - it’s great to have you aboard. Not subscribed yet? Now’s a perfect time.
ART! // Demon Slayer’s delirious digital aesthetics
It was my eldest son’s 15th birthday last week, and of all the different things he wanted to do, going to the cinema to watch Demon Slayer seemed to be the easiest win.
Demon Slayer is anime, Japanese (and sometimes Korean) cartoons and I feel - or felt - like I “get” anime.
I’ve watched Akira and Ghost in the Shell. I ❤️❤️❤️ Satoshi Kon’s films - Paprika, which inspired Inception, the Hitchcock-ish Perfect Blue and the Fritz Lang-ish Paranoia Agent are all BRILLIANT. And I am smart enough to know that all those awesome Studio Ghibli films like Spirited Away aren’t even anime.
So I thought I’d get Demon Slayer.
But sitting in the cinema, dazed and bewildered, I realised up to then I’d just been watching the acceptable artistic edges of a genre.
Anime has become seriously globally popular, taken on by Netflix and Amazon Prime as a genre that plays globally and of which there is a ton of content in abundant supply,
And Demon Slayer is the most popular of all.
Demon Slayer is a raw dose of a delirious, shifting, utterly unstable aesthetic, much much closer in tone and feel to the wildness of social media and meme culture than to Studio Ghibli.
At a moment when lots of voices are worrying that art and entertainment are being consumed by a new form of media whose only purpose is distraction, and that AI may already be amplifying this deluge on Instagram and YouTube, Demon Slayer feels important - a new style of storytelling built for the brains of the 2020s.
If you’ve got Netflix, go and watch a few episodes and come back… Then let’s breakdown what’s happening.
Demon Slayer’s narratives are ruthlessly simple - in every episode, one of a group of Demon Slayer’s hunts down and kills a Demon that appears somewhere nearby in a kinda-Samurai era Japan.
But in the visual storytelling we get - often in the same scene - so many different forms of visual styling it becomes extremely slippery to hold onto.
Quite often an image will be composed of three or four layers.
Characters drawn in a matt 2d hand-drawn and inked style, with no exterior lighting that changes their colour or tone
Characters’ eyes highlighted using an array of inconsistent light-effects which don’t suggest light shining on them, but that the light is shining out of their eyes.
Backgrounds modelled in 3D, but often blurred, and with a realistic lighting effect from an in-scene sun or moon:
Special-effects layered on top of fight-scenes that are 3d-styled over 2d-drawings, lighting the characters in ways they’re not done elsewhere, but with the effect very obviously different in style from the object that caused it
And this mix of 2d and 3d, hand-drawn and modelled, flat and textureed is then used in storytelling that has a similarly disorienting use of temporal and perspectival effects.
From Sam Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch or Bonnie and Clyde onwards, we’re used to slow motion as part of the visual styling of filmic violence, with Zak Snyder’s Director’s Cut of his Justice League film a kind of mad apotheosis of the way decelerating the speed of the image elevates carnage to the mythic and heroic.
But in Demon Slayer violence doesn’t slow-down consistently, it does it in an unstable way, flipping from slow-speeds to normal; normal to sped-up.
And similarly perspective shifts constantly - we move back and forth from seeing in the third person to seeing in the first person, typically as a character is on the run where they often seem to see a totally different world from the one we’ve been shown.
The combined effect ends up much more aesthetically extreme than anything i’ve seen in the “art” anime I’ve watched before.
It achieves in a 15 rated cartoon which will be watched by millions of people online the same delirium of a self-conscious avant-garde extremist like director Gaspar Noe, whose Enter the Void works a lot harder to screw with your mind to not dissimilar outcomes.
If you go to art looking for aesthetic consistency, Demon Slayer may feel like a mess. And maybe it is just a massive hot mess. Stories about the extremely pressured and poor working conditions under which anime is produced are all over the internet.
But I think it’s much more than that.
I think what we’re seeing in anime are the elements of a style that is authentic to our times, an authentic bi-product of how digital culture both produces and experiences the world - not as a coherent singular style, but a constantly shifting assemblage of different forms.
We can see this elsewhere in the rise of sludge posts on TikTok - the weird amalgam’s of different content in a mashed together pulp of Family Guy clips, Subway Surfers streams and two, three, four other layers.
And we can see this in the “shit post modernism” musical trends I talked about back in issue 18, multi-layers of parody and mash-up that bewilder our ability to find a comfortable perspective to listen from.
This is real 21st century culture, being spat out at speed in front of us.
It’s easy to find a kind of moral revolt in this seemingly bacchic madness - this week
who I love has been just one of many speaking out against this demented stew that seems to be accelerating thanks to generative AI.It’s all so unstable, so hard to hold onto, so self-consciously discontinuous.
But sitting in the cinema with my 15 year old, and seeing how he got it, how he gets the wildness of TikTok, or the crazy ill-fitting perfection of Weird Liars, moral judgment is the wrong approach.
This IS the emergent aesthetics of the 2020s. It’s there in cartoons. It’s there in social media posts. It’s there in music.
It’s there in culture’s most potent edges and demonstrates again what I said in Issue 18: It’s not and never about what’s coolest in digital creativity, it’s in what’s happening in the wildly popular but least acceptable edges where the real future is being made.
If we turn away from the creativity of Demon Slayer, sludge posts and Weird Liars we’re fooling ourselves. They’re our taste of the future and tomorrow’s artists will adapt and adopt their lessons into new avant-gardes and new mainstream culture.
Only by doing that can they then help us understand a brutally disconcerting world that old ways of telling stories can no longer make sense of.
Get making.
IDEAS! // The first major books on NFTs
One of the ideas that we’ve covered before is how the digital art market - for so many decades a messy domain of different micro-genres, that was hard to navigate and even harder to collect - is concentrating into a single coherent entity.
That’s good news - it will allow major artists to emerge, and remove the need for audiences and buyers to understand technical distinctions that really shouldn’t matter.
This week there’s been a couple more signs of the maturation of digital art as two major books try to capture the story of NFTs.
Books give permanence and credibility - even in a digital world they’re lustre of thoughtful authority has, remarkably, maintained. And so these two significant volumes are a sign that NFTs are here to stay.
First up is Taschen’s beautiful monster On NFTs. The first full art historical survey of the different parts of the NFT artistic universe it is big, beautiful … and expensive.
£750 for the standard collectors edition.
£1,500 for the metal slipcased edition.
… And anything up to £4,000 for the versions which come with their own exclusive NFTs.
Sexy as hell? Yes.
Doing anything to diminish the idea of NFTs as a luxury market adjunct and a license to splash cash? Er, no.
Do I want one? Yes! Will I be buying a new dishwasher instead. Also yes.
A different attempt to capture the intellectual and creative backstory of the NFT-era comes from an anthology book from the brilliant Right Click Save.
If you’ve never read Right Click Save, get over there now. It’s dedicated to just this act of binding the fragmented histories of digital arts into a single narrative, tracing lines between the computer, generative and media artists of the past and those of the NFT-powered present into a single whole of digital art history.
Alex Estorick, Right Click Save’s founder kindly let me read an early edition, and this document makes such good sense as paper and ink. Consistently excellent writing - clear, direct, thoughtful - captures a moment in art history when past and present have reconfigured.
Get reading.
TECHNOLOGY! // Smart rings and the untapped data of neuro-arts
We’ve seen a series of new device categories hotting up over the last few months: spatial computing and smart glasses in the form of Apple’s Vision Pro, and the first Chat-GPT type AI-powered devices in the Rabbit and the Humane Pin.
There’s a third coming fast down the track, the smart ring, with formal announcements of Samsung’s first entry into this space, hot rumours of Apple’s entry to come, and a whole heap of start-ups and smaller competitors already in-market.
The use case for Smart rings is passive health monitoring, ceaselessly capturing what Samsung calls your “vitality” and across a whole series of areas from oxygen in the blood to menstrual cycles, sleep quality and more.
It’s an interesting category. I have a deep loathing of smart watches, which I’ve never found fit for any purpose whatsoever, their battery life fundamentally too short, and their screen size too small to be useful. But smart rings I get - long battery life, discreet styling, low-ish price points and some useful knowledge from the data they collect.
But before this device category explodes, let’s make a plea for some creative use cases.
The trouble with Health data is its boring. It’s about monitoring gym sessions and sleep cycles, menstruation and oxygenation. All good stuff, but elevating the every-day, when we should be elevating creativity. Where we should be elevating ART!
There’s two angles I think CreaTech developers should be looking at here.
The first is the emerging idea of “neuro-arts”, the study of the health and wellbeing impacts of art which is gaining traction in many areas. This excellent Art Fund initiative, “Your Brain on Art”, that uses a light brain computer interface to capture what looking at art does to brain activity, could scale out to “Your Body on Art” to capture how films, dance, music or whatever change our bodies activity.
The second is to promote and provoke physical creativity.
Whether playing an instrument, dancing, walking round an art gallery or more, using the ring as a two-way interface to capture and celebrate your creative interaction seems to me as important, as vital, as the wider Health category the devices are being primarily designed for.
I think there’s a wider imperative to this. We HAVE to fight to keep art and creativity in these emergent technological spaces - they’re usually so close, but not quite the primary use cases they should be.
Time to step up.
Sorry today’s email was late. Something went weird.
Hi Duncan - sorry that happened and thanks for subscribing. Let me see what I can do and come back to you shortly.
Thanks Elizabeth! It was good fun to write.