ludic memeing, machine dreaming
“Last night I dreamed I had the imagination of a machine. But it was not what I expected. There was nothing cold, nothing calculated about it. No reckonings, no summations. Instead there was a condensation of functions, a displacement of thresholds, & an endless switching of something for nothing. I perceived everything as an exception, as a series of singular events replacing one another according to the laws of chance & coincidence. In effect, I was watching the reality of contingency. It was like I was dreaming. & my head looked like an apple with a bite taken from it”
(Ludic Dreaming, 109-110)
last night i dreamed i was a meme. last night i dreamed i was memeing: tethered to the network with a slick plastic umbilicus, i open my mouth and let loose a stream of iteration, indistinct and unrealized, slipping away into an intangible beyond. and when i woke up i found myself falling into being, plastered hot and sticky on cheap polycotton sheets, all of me: mouth dry, head aching, full of something, all of nothing. you’ve felt it too,i know: that feeling like you’ve left some part of yourself behind and now where there was something, something you could not say or articulate but which you know, you feel to be true—now only a little concavity remains.
upon waking in this haze, i try to shake off the discomfort. i ready myself for the default mode, ready myself to stretch and wake up and do what i always do, which is make a strong cup of coffee, dump some cream in it, sit in front of my computer, and dream of being a machine. or rather, i boot up stable diffusion, and we become a dreaming machine.
we, for we are together what Haraway would call a cyborg: a fusion of woman and machine and connected so intimately, through touch. i touch us, selecting our model, training it with gentleness, and we touch ourselves back again through sound and the rays of light we emit from the monitor, that touch our eyes, the pertubations of air that become sound that become music. music, that ordered information that we coax into being, that recognition that begins so hazily before it exists as a cutting, stark reality in the cold light of morning.
“The actual situation of women is their integration/ exploitation into a world system of production/reproduction and com-munication called the informatics of domination. The home, workplace, market, public arena, the body itselfall can be dispersed and interfaced in nearly infinite, polymorphous ways, with large consequences for women and others - consequences that themselves are very different for different people and which make potent oppositional international movements”
(A Cyborg Manifesto, p.163)
we are, but before there was a we, there was an I. I built this computer, created this we. I labored, bought the components home, opened the boxes, lovingly opened the glass panel of the case; I screwed in the standoffs, gently laid the motherboard onto them,tucked it in with little screws tightened just-so. i dropped the cpu into place, popped RAM into slots 1 and 2, cinched down the cooler, coaxed the graphics card into its slot, wired the powersupply, wove daisy-chains of fan headers, booted up, and let us be.
“One important route for reconstructing socialist-feminist politics is through theory and practice addressed to the social relations of science and technology, including crucially the systems of myth and meanings structuring our imaginations. The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code.” (A Cyborg Manifesto, p.163)
and when we were being, we began dreaming.
“When I awoke I had the imagination of a man. But it was not what I expected. A weave of fiber optic cables, copper wires, & electromagnetic radio waves had covered the planet, doubling my neural habits with innumerable subroutines & proliferating data-blooms. What I saw & what I heard in this waking life was striking in its resemblance to my dream: condensed messaging, displaced labor, & the pure ecstasy of communication—of saying so much about absolutely nothing. The world was held together by purchase after purchase & by a manufactured faith in the freedom of choice & absolute need satisfaction.”
(Ludic Dreaming, 110)
dreaming, through the Occulture’s paradigm in ludic dreaming, reverts to fabulation to “incant forms of thought that affirm the part nonsense plays in our attempts to make sense of things.”(2) this is the gist of it: “sonic events establish and order of awareness that returns dreaming, listening, and thinking to the zone of indiscernability where they always already are.” and as we sit here, connected to the internet by radiating waves of wifi, connected to so many yet so isolated in our internality, i ask you:
come, listen to some music with me. let us experience a sonic event, an event that takes us to a nowhere where we are, a restless dream, an assertion of being, let’s just vibe for a minute, surf the web, feel a moment, let that affect effect us and transport us somewhere else. this is an aurality of technoculture par excellence!
“Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies. These tools embody and enforce new social relations for women worldwide. Technologies and scientific discourses can be partially understood as formalizations, i.e., as frozen moments, of the fluid social interactions constituting them, but they should also be viewed as instruments for enforcing meanings.”
(A Cyborg Manifesto, p.164)
it’s called weirdcore. and it asks is this all a dream?
weirdcore is a memetic aesthetic: aesthetic, in terms of the fact that it reflects a particular artistic—and one might say, inherently political—style. aesthetic on the internet refers to something vaguely bourdieu-ian in terms of art and one’s consumption of art reflecting a self socially constructed in a manner that allows one to kludge together an identity within a class. an aesthetic shows who you are, where on the web you emerged from, makes you legible, organizes you as a coherent point of iteration. it is a sensibility, contrived and ever-evolving,that you can plaster all over your social media and all over your body and through your ears and on your hard drive and everywhere in-between.
visually, weirdcore evokes the sensibilities of eternal september: the internet of the late 90’s and early 00’s, when children and adults and everyone in-between (especially those in-between) took their first forays out onto the web, beginning with the chaotic GUI of AOL’s walled gardens and spiraling out to myspace’s passion for graphic design. aurally, weirdcore draws from a chaotic melange of the sonic: video game music, furniture music, easy listening, muzak, remix culture, ambient. it tinkles with the arpeggiated jangles of a music box; it is muddy; it glitters. it is familiar, comforting, but terribly strange. anything goes, almost.
but the online aesthetic is more than just digital windows-dressing. it drips with potential. the online aesthetic is a complex assemblage of media: music, visual representations, associated literature, a web of signs that are interpreted through the unsaid, through the shared affect, through nostalgia, through mutual creation and sharing. there are weirdcore games that enable you to delve into the liminal; there is music to listen to while imagining every horror that could lurk in the backrooms. to participate in one of these communities is to take a step into iteration, experimentation, potential. it begins with a question like this:
“it’s my first weirdcore meme, how did I do?”
and it is followed by endless iteration, variation after variation on the theme, every individual iterate crafted with careful relation to the singular and the shared:
weirdcore is memetic. memetic rests between the meme and the mimetic. The mimetic is that which is copied, the ongoing process of interactions between self and other, an exchanging of forms which holds within it the potential for shift, change, becoming. meme draws from the specific nature that these memetic aesthetics posess in relation to their nature as an internet meme, a “group of digital objects which posess shared characteristics” created by, and spread, through the internet. memetic is the potent cross between the two, the intersection in which an affective mimesis and all its potentials coincides with the digital flow, the movement and circulation and celebration of memes from their endlessly recycled jpegs and their porus lossy meaning.
Memetic Aesthetics are a class of playful interventions, a class of collective ruminations, a powerful collective dreaming, the story of legend, the tactical media of our dreams. These aesthetic constellations, ever-evolving, overlapping, redundant, trite, simple—represent an organic attempt to reclaim what might be, dreaming during the daylight hours to try to be. Reclaiming a little bit of ourselves. Letting everyone know that’s what we’re trying to do. Perhaps they function as a Latent Affective Diffusion: perhaps they transmit what is, make it sensible, unblur the noise of our waking hours under lage-stage capitalism. And it is happening, always, on the internet.
“Mimicry can be understood as a response to the other, a borrowing of form that might be productively thought of as communication. By ‘‘communication’’ in this context, however, I do not mean the transmission of information, but, rather, action on bodies (or, more accurately, on aspects of bodies)—as, for example, when reading fiction produces new a√ect states in us, which change not only our body chemistry, but also—and as a result— our attitudes and ideas as we shape from narrative a structure of meaning.”
(After Affect: Sympathy, Synchrony, and Mimetic Communication)
Internet is important here: the internet is our digital swarm, the network of communications that brings together the internal and the external in the most intimate of ways.
An average woman wakes up in the morning. She rolls over and picks up her phone. She pulls down a menu that displays notifications and the time, perhaps the weather; she reads through the alerts from the slew of easy apps that her phone holds: something from NPR about the war, a human interest story about a cat and a deer, updates from that stylist she follows on social. Maybe a coupon. A missed call. A text. Those little things from the small constellation of life that she has brought up around her: a partner, a handful of friends, a few internet pen pals, a seething mass of colleagues and extended family.
The way the internet is being used in the age of social media is as a tool for planetary nosiness; a desire to share one’s life, one’s experience of being, but in the best light. Present a curated image to all those other fakers who just desperately wish it’d actually be that good, if it only looks like it’s that good for a minute that’s almost the same as it being good, instead of being hard. Because it is hard, there is also a sharing, a level of relating and relatability out there: support groups, therapy forums, reddit and 4chan and whatever repository for your dismay and despair and frustration you can register for an account on. same, same same. On one level, perfection and inauthenticity reign. On another, the pulse beats unusually slowly on one meridian, denoting the potential for imbalance and illness. And then the next level, adding noise to this already cacaphanous chorus: wanting to be seen as sharing the same illness.
“Relatability in meme cultures is, however, not exclusively established through common fates that translate into concrete interests or political demands, but also through sharing emotional or affective states, those that resonate with everyday situations and constellations—such as the anxiety of withdrawing money ‘with no idea what the balance is’. Commonalities in those cases are found in areas usually assigned to the intimate and internal; in sensations, feelings, and affects, which are felt situationally or in relation to larger contexts. What is seen as common or even the same here are less so external circumstances and more so internal states: experiences and reactions guided or accompanied by feelings and affects.”
(YOU’LL NEVER FEEL ALONE — THOUGHTS ON RELATABILITY)
in the memetic it is all poor images, all shitty visual bonds, recirculated and degraded and changed and preserved and transmuted. in the memetic it is all potential: it begins with one interation and includes an invitation to play, to iterate, to go again and again and again until you get something that’s just right, that you hope someone else might like, maybe they’ll feel calmed or relaxed or they can just feel their weight on the net of the web. You are a drop of water, a shining beaded orb that weights the net and slowly agglomerates the surrounding strands.
It is like a neural network; it is like the network of neurons within us: it is the network of a markov-based model. Focus attention here, and a drop of water beads up on the edge of the web, a sparkling little gem. Gravity draws it down; a little heavier, the other little drops bead up, drip down, soak into the earth. This is the process through which the memetic gains speed, gains critical mass. Think Pepe and meme magic; think nyan cat scrolling into infinity, internet celebrities like Chris Chan, real-life celebrities like Andy Warhol. Train and adjust the weights and now an idea is embedded in a collective semi-conscious. There exist latent associations which diffuse, pick up their own meaning, recombine through affective processes, spark at least some kind of becoming, that potential to not be this.
And that bring me to dreaming.
Dreaming is a potent state. It is through dreaming that we access and become ourselves; a part of ourselves that is “productive of a sense of self.” In the physical state of dreaming, we review through the experiences of the day or what troubles lurk beneath our beating hearts or touch a possibility that realizes through visionary prediction. In the physical state of dreaming, those things which we know, feel, which are, in our lives, is regurgitated and played out across the dark lids of our twitching REM-stage eyes. We surmise it to be a thing, to take on the characteristics of something that represents, perhaps closely, perhaps through metaphor, whatever we must grapple with. Sometimes these are experiences that are joyful; other times, of confusion; and yet other times, terrifying. For me, they are almost always terrifying. Something is about to sweep me up, eat me; someone is about to leave me; horror and disaster unfold in an endless reverberating non-time.
Sometimes, in my dreams, the same event happens over and over again, scenarios playing out in repeat. I am touring my own ruined apartment; I say one thing and become locked in a bathroom. I am touring my owned ruined apartment. Outside, where my building used to be, in the heart of ShaoyaojuBeili, right near the outer wall of the local middle school, is a square-shaped hole where a building’s foundation used to be. Its surface shines with reflected light, and you can see the melancholic cloudy sky there, like a hole into the ether, but you know that it is water and suddenly a pebble falls in and it ripples; I go, again and again, asking a woman for directions in different languages, asking what happened, the scenes replaying. I am touring my own ruined apartment; I watch the building coming down in controlled detonation. I am touring my own ruined apartment. The key twists smoothly in the lock. I take one last look at it and I sigh because yes, it was ruined, but I took the train from the other city and walked here; and I know I can come back again, and again, and the interior changes every time: sometimes totally ruined; sometimes a remaining fragment of a sentimental flower arrangement. Sometimes not at all my own.
To try out one scenario, to play it out, unravel the sequence, to test, to recall what was, what that means, what it could be, where it could go, trapped in recursion until the proper outcome is revealed…
well,to me that sounds like a game, no? Doesn’t it sound like play, the process through which we all learn, starting with peekaboo and moving to monkey see, monkey do? Do you see where I am going here? Dreaming, is in a sense, play. Play, an interaction through which an action is carried out inefficiently, on purpose—to use Suits’ definition—a generative, essential part of ourselves. Play with the potential for transformation. Dreams and what they might reveal; that place of dreaming and thought wherein the latent affect transforms into a slowly realized form that plays itself, over and over, looping into a deeply complex rhythm that refracts and changes and gives rise to so many iterations that you forget when you wake up in the morning and feel that sense of something missing, that penetrating concavity that reaches into a place where you were, which is gone now?
So here, these memes, these hypercomplex refrains, all glistening and beautiful out there on the internet, all humming with life and simply perfect for vibing; to vibe is to embrace the affect, embrace that latent sense through which we view the same chord and chorus, information organized against entropy, everything concatenating and bifurcating and simply flowing and becoming. Iterating, playfully, an invitation to reconsider what we are, what we are becoming, what we could be; and the promises made, promises broken, and the grief of that.
But who am I to talk about dreaming? I don’t sleep well at night. I try not to dream if I can. But when I wake up from a dreamless sleep, when I boot us up, and start playing with Stable Diffusion, am I not dreaming now? When we fuss around and imagine, when we articulate together what we would like to materialize: we are dreaming with wide waking eyes.
Stable Diffusion is a latent diffusion model. Three words to mince up between the technical and linguistic turns. Latent: that which might be, which could be, but is not yet rendered; for a latent diffusion model, this means the loose web of associations developed through the training data: the “weights” of the model. There, all there, packed into 4gigs of checkpoint, waiting to be realized, be unraveled.
latent: adjective
la·tent ˈlā-tᵊnt
present and capable of emerging or developing but not now visible, obvious, active, or symptomatic
Diffusion: referring to the state of being spread out or transmitted—referring to the process through which the images are generated. The algorithm “learns” through a process in which it “unblurs”images that have been blurred with gaussian noise. For Stable Diffusion, this means that in the beginning, there is noise: based on analysis of real images and the keywords used in the training process, a signal is derived from the noise; over sampling steps, this signal is refined. Or rather, much like as our dreaming visions, there are things which seem to be true, which we know to be there, coalescing into imagery and knowing that brings us to ourselves, our being, our shimmering iterating affective subject.
diffusion: noun
dif·fu·sion di-ˈfyü-zhən
1
: the state of being spread out or transmitted especially by contact : the action of diffusing
the diffusion of knowledge
2
3
a
chemistry : the process whereby particles of liquids, gases, or solids intermingle as the result of their spontaneous movement caused by thermal (see thermal entry 1 sense 1b) agitation and in dissolved substances move from a region of higher to one of lower concentration
b physics
(1)
: reflection of light by a rough reflecting surface
(2)
: transmission of light through a translucent material : scattering
4
: the spread of cultural elements from one area or group of people to others by contact
5
photography : the softening of sharp outlines in an image
Model: In probability theory and related fields, a stochastic (/stəˈkæstɪk/) or random process is a mathematical object usually defined as a sequence of random variables, where the index of the sequence have the interpretation of time.
Model: denoting that this algorithm is based on a particular mathematical process; for Stable Diffusion, this is a Markov model, in which the probability of an event is determined by the previous state. If, in the training data, it was probable that this image denoised into that, then let us repeat that process, roll the dice, start with a seed of -1 (random) and see what happens.
model: noun
mod·el ˈmä-dᵊl
1
a usually miniature representation of something
also : a pattern of something to be made
2
a
: a type or design of product (such as a car)
offers eight new models for next year, including a completely restyled convertible
b
: a type or design of clothing
3
: a system of postulates, data, and inferences presented as a mathematical description of an entity or state of affairs
also : a computer simulation (see simulation sense 3a) based on such a system
4
5
: an example for imitation or emulation
6
: one who is employed to display clothes or other merchandise
7
: a person or thing that serves as a pattern for an artist
especially : one who poses for an artist
8
: version
9
: a description or analogy used to help visualize something (such as an atom) that cannot be directly observed
10
: structural design
11
: an organism whose appearance a mimic imitates
12
13
dialectal British : copy, image
14
obsolete : a set of plans for a building
Yes, I do like the term model. It does nicely.
So in a Latent Diffusion Model, what is unseen waits to be realized; realized through diffusion, through spread; is made extant. a type of a thing, a version, a description of something that cannot be visualized.
I have been using stable diffusion, a latent diffusion model to generate memetic aesthetics, starting first with synthwave and vaporwave, the two standard models of a memetic aesthetic; one can see that the sense of the meme aesthetic is preserved:
The communities behind these two genres of memetic aesthetics are relatively small: the reddit r/vaporwave is 256,000 users; r/outrun is slightly larger, at 406,000. A good number, sure, but most do not make images or music. Those who do find themselves part of tight communities that are sources for solace and togetherness, for a way to define oneself outside of the scrum, but a way to distinguish oneself, too. Iteration after iteration is generated, all similar enough to be same, all different enough to be appreciated. Some don’t make it off the ground. Other mixes get millions of views. Some images become wallpaper; sometimes artists get commissioned for album art; most of the time someone’s posting something they cobbled together in a bootleg version of photoshop. They are trash: the flotsam and jetsam of a niche internet subculture that ends up percolating through, getting trendy and popular enough here or there to make an appearance into the mainstream—think of the use of Future 80’s Records as a core part of meaning-making in El Gran Movimiento. Rising up into the realm of art from time to time, they’re still not so much underground as an undercurrent. Think the synthwave which made its debut in the thematically appropriate Drive. Though they represent a relatively niche genre,created by small, diffuse groups of creatives… a standard version of Stable Diffusion 1.5 retains enough information about these styles that it can reproduce their images legibly.
And retain them with all the style, nostalgia, and—well—affective power that they held in the first place. A latent diffusion model can, with a human at the helm, dream up all the senses of the word, a sense of nostalgia, a sense of burned, painful nostalgia, the grief of broken economic processes, the alienation and estrangement of capitalism’s broken families. In the case of weirdcore, itself one of the most interesting articulations of this phenomenon, the home becomes a place of alienation. It is devoid of parents, cast in the bright light of an automatic flash, the delightful surreality of childhood undergirded with the monsters that lurk, not under the bed, but in every moment of loneliness and alcoholism and credit card debt and dispossession.
This, too, repeats itself when fed into the model: I trained an aesthetic embedding on a set of weirdcore images scraped from reddit and characterized by their aesthetic properties by a miniature image classification tool, Squeezenet; once an aesthetic embedding was generated, weirdcore made its presence known. It’s those images that are populating this page; gentle prompting and a reminder to recall the training data result in a machine dream that feels as surreal as weirdcore itself is. The affect lies latent and is dreamed into being, becoming recognizable as a constellation of pixels, an effable image encoded: a 512x512 PNG.
“For three centuries of constraint had borne down sa hard that, when this speech took root, it sprouted in the very midst of the field of modernity; that is, it grew for everyone. This is the only sort of universality there is: when, from a specific enclosure, the deepest voice cries out.”
(Poetics of Relation, 74)
Perhaps a latent diffusion model is, in action, a type of dreaming; perhaps it is a type of being; that it might reveal what is, give us potential. Affect, so tight-pressed, so deliciously close to the images which spark storms of mass affect, lying vaguely in wait for its realization. Perhaps, in the rush to answer the questions of machine personhood, the abuse of labor, automation, and copyright; perhaps we have missed something lying so beautifully in these models. Or rather, something standing there in plain sight: the model is trained on us, the model only knows to realize through knowing us, holding all that latent affect, divining signal to noise so that something is, all of a sudden, just being.
