I’m at home: 3D models of pink and orange Pepsi cans haloed in pixel garbage strewn around, a statue of Hera with a Windows 95 logo stamped over her face. A boulevard of white and purple chat threads stretching alongside a wall of text, a manifesto proclaiming the virtue of late 90s anime. A livestream of ‘Future Funk to Help You Remember’ plays from a corner, piano tripping over sampled basslines and Japanese vocals. The site is pulling – give or take – 50 concurrent visitors. Not bad for a Friday night.
In a private chat, I am wrangling an artist named Lachrimae.exe. They once worked on a Versace ad. Far too famous for a struggling Vaporwave community like this. But a month ago – inexplicably – they’d responded to my hopeless solicitation email, agreed to create a new series of digital paintings for the site. This is the third time in two weeks they’ve come to me with the threat of flaking out.
“ethan…” Lachrimae says, “can I call you 3than?”
“I don’t have anything against the letter e, personally,” I respond.
“ethan you have to understand that i have an image to maintain and if i give you something that’s less than perfect my image will be trash…ultra trash…they’ll make videos about me called LACHRIMAE EXPOSED-ART DEAD FOREVER? do you understand”
Honestly, is it that difficult to punctuate correctly? “What about your 800k Instagram followers?” I say, “You’ve never disappointed them.”
“850k actually”
When I opened the site, I pictured myself as a patron, my virtual arms open, saint-like, to welcome downtrodden creatives. ‘Who is this mysterious tastemaker?’ they would ask. ‘How can I know him?’ I did not imagine myself babysitting a dense 24-year-old who needs to be told they’re flawless twice a day.
“ethan,” Lachrimae says, “Ethan ethan ethn Ehtan 3than 3than Ethan 3th4n 3TH4N.”
In another tab, my sent folder is full of emails that end ‘Let me know if there’s else I can do for you.’ When I opened the site, I pictured myself as interesting to others. I should’ve known better.
“Won’t you at least let me see what you’re working on?”
“i cannot”
“Can you describe it to me?” My cursor hovers near this line, pointing as if to shame this stupid conversation.
“but art has to be seen”
“And you won’t let me see it?”
“i cannot”
I pick up the chat window and fling it across the screen. “How about this, then? Think of the ad revenue,” I say, “That healthy cut you’re getting.”
“money…” The chat flashes three dots to indicate an incoming response.
When I was younger, Aunt Margaret, a triple divorcee with a kinetic wardrobe, liked to tell me about the Ballets Russes. Picture this, she would say, Matisse and Stravinsky and Anna Pavolva, all the groundbreakers of art, music, dance united under one banner. I would picture this, and nod. Think, she would say, of the man behind it all, Sergei Diaghilev, plucking his lovers from a crop of artists in their prime, carving his name into the annals of history and into the face of Art itself. I would think, and be thrilled.
“my ??????? is at stake” Lachrimae says, finally. I wonder which generator they’d run to for that wide text, how they’d decided that ‘dignity’ was the right word to emphasize. “money is nothing to me”
This is a tailored crisis, engineered, performative. This is the function I’m meant to serve: to tell them they’re perfect, they’re brilliant, everything they create is transcendent. I won’t have it.
I storm out, over to my other monitor where I’ve got a bakery simulator running. My bakery is not like the site, with its emphasis on the jarring and artificial. Instead there’s accordion music, birds chirping, warm wood and cream-colored furniture. My vision hazes at the edges until adjusting to the change. I stand at the counter, drag the ingredients for a rustic loaf from the pantry. Flour, salt, yeast, water. An animation of hands groping into a bowl loops over my head. I imagine that I can smell the sharpness of the yeast, that I can feel the sticky dough in between my fingers.
My bakery-husband pops in and leans on the counter. He taps his foot to the music. Little music notes float above his red hair. I married him over the other 3 eligible NPCs for that hair. On screen it may look blocky, but it’s easy to imagine how its physical analogue would feel draping down onto my cheek. He says, “Got anything for my sweet tooth?” One of four lines he’s scripted to say and even he wants to be given shit. I google how to divorce him. Apparently, this is not a function of the game.
A few customers shuffle in. Bakery-husband wanders out (good riddance). Supplies run low. I purchase more. Supplies turn to breads, to pastries. Funds tick up and down. Products are taken from shelves and replaced. Pixelated birds chirp, eat pixelated worms, die in pixelated dirt, are eaten by pixelated worms. Transactions, transactions, transactions. I am sick of being useful. Somewhere, I got it in my head that one day I wouldn’t need to be useful. Must have been one of those pixelated worms, crawling into my ear and whispering my hopes up.
I return to the site. Lachrimae has blasted our chat with pictures of cats with distressed facial expressions. The song playing from the stream features vocals slowed and stretched and some inside joke on the sitewide discussion has spawned a long thread of saxophone emojis.
I chose my words carefully, so I will appear detached. “Alright Lachrimae,” I say, “I understand that you only want to put your best work out there. Thanks for the effort.” The typing dots appear, but I close the window.
The absence of music settles on me. I’d like to talk to someone, but I don’t know who.
# # #
Merle Kinney is a writer living in Jackson, MS who is interested in digital spaces, gender, and the world of work.
Photo: Jack B
