meatspace

May, 2021

“Culture has nothing to do with precincts, yards, centres, nor hubs.”

Cyberspace (bits) / meatspace (dust). 

How does the notion of ‘space’ make sense within both of these environments? By their supposedly separate existence on screens and landscapes, a false distinction is maintained between the space of information (cyber-) and the space of matter (meat-). Ever since the collapsed dreams of internet utopianism and the pop of the dot-com bubble, the formless and contentless abstraction of ‘space’ has gradually become the pure capitalist territory that land had mistakenly occupied. Still, the imminence of cultural meltdown has proven to be slower than first anticipated; the distinction of lifeworlds between cyberspace/meatspace remains intact despite incessant upheavals and catastrophes in the realms of technology, the environment, geopolitical relations, and biological outbreak. One strand of our sprawling cyberpunk dystopia has materialised through Instagram where meat life is commodified into algorithmically displayed moments to be liked, shared, then lost in time like tears in rain. Still, our meatspace masks are more like stubborn grafts and are not so easily removed; rrealartt’s cyber existence struggles to split from its empirical connection to meatspace — admins and @’s continue to DM “so, who’s the artist?” It is through meatspace that we can discredit the illusion between screen and flesh. Our post-vaporwave situation has truly coalesced into the new aesthetic territory of cybermeatic Grainwave. 

Crawling through the material substrata of the world wide web, SARS-Cov-2 has proven to be more of a mutant arachnid pest than an infectious virus. The meatspace world has viciously generated its own militant bio-insurgency as its mutant strains out maneuver the jabbed arms of central planning. In the fallout of pre-2020 cultural collapse, the corporate spaces of platform capitalism, such as Instagram, allow their bots continue to breathe easy and accelerate the scroll across the mobius surface of spacelessness. They warn us not to go too far (look after your mental health). Alas, by limiting just a thumbprint in cyberspace, a stubborn cottage-core attachment to the days of our meatspace idyl preserves our human hubris of being neither-this-nor-that — autonomy verified by the pretense of active decision making. The experience of meatspace is possible only through the privatised lens of corporate cyberspace. Luxuriously boring, Instagram is our November 2019 Los Angeles. The Metalheadz have become meatheadz. 

IG user @clare_mcleod (2014 – present) began posting on the platform, like many other bots, they saw it as a way to plug into a smooth space of convenient  socialising and shitposting. Through their vacuum sealing of dust, they don’t seek to flatten the divide between these two spaces toward a naive ‘better’ society 2.0. Rather they establish their own Operation Warp Speed toward flattening the curve of humanity’s progress. @clare_mcleod shows that excessive sucking replaces reproductive fucking as the primary means of establishing new populations that do not discriminate.

meatspace will be intermittently live-streamed over the course of two weeks so viewers can follow the action of live dust formation in rreal-time.