The Loona Database and Trashgram: Archives at the End of History
The Loona Database and Trashgram: Archives at the End of History
Caroline Cai
Otaku Girl Rooms by Shiori Kawamoto (2012)
Screenshots from various Instagram accounts; Accounts seen in photo.
At every technological phase shift throughout history—as our tools and raw materials change, from charcoal to paint to pixels to matrices with AI, the ephemeral world of codes and symbols that rule us changes with it. A minor tweak in technological infrastructure, such as the Instagram grid’s vertical aspect ratio favoring reels over stills, can reshape our basic perception as we scan reality for content. Sometime during the late 2010s, there was a marked shift on Instagram when girls stopped posting the money shot of themselves posing for the camera and started posting twenty-part slideshows of miscellany. Instagram was formerly used to record proper milestones—well-lit and composed, manicured pictures of graduation, baby showers, birthday dinners, etc. The new mode of posting is demonstrated by Emma Chamberlain, the Zoomer voice of a generation, who posts blurry, tight shots of three bloody, used band aids, her Invisalign resting on the counter, and a lone, dirty hot pink Croc. Vogue posits that the photo dump “is an affectation employed to signify a kind of ennui with modern social media,” or rather a curation of a lack of curation.
Users who are particularly adept at being gridded sort through the clattering stimuli of the world around us and distill it down to a tidy sequence of Instagrammable photos. In doing so, they inaugurate arbitrary, found arrangements into tableaus of life that may serve as an anthropological document. This is not dissimilar from the rise of conceptual art, where galleries began showcasing everyday objects such as a urinal or dirty dishes within their exalted, white walls, forcing its audience to contemplate why they belong there in the first place. And like much of the media-conscious conceptual art of this pedigree, the photo dump’s aesthetic realization hinges on gathering witnesses to corroborate a piquant feeling, akin to a muffled desire, arising from seemingly meaningless stimuli. Sianne Ngai describes conceptual art as “an instance of and an art about this absorption of modes of circulation into modes of production” wherein the meta-commentary on the medium itself takes precedence over its content. The need for discourse is birthed to resolve feelings of defamiliarization that may arise from such works, as a whiff of poetry cannot help but become knowledge at last.
Kichkaʼs Breakfast I by Daniel Spoerri (1960)
Gridding, as an act of enframing, helps us imagine a way beyond the particular impasse presented by an object’s brute alterity, mute like wood. The self-evident, panoramic world is stripped of its glory and broken down into a mechanical exchange of tight shots that we may enjoy doubly as both a fact and a spectacle, as a part of our material reality and our social media performance. Anna Gorham writes on modern posting that “to post is to hope that someone else can reconstruct the whole from the fragment, but all they ever receive is the shard. What we offer as expression is consumed as surface.” Larry Gagosian said about this new velocity of images that while it helps manufacture demand for art, it also “gives things less of a shelf life sometimes. Because you get image saturation...images get exhausted faster.” This is perhaps true of all forms of visual culture.
Breaking up the omnipresent whole of reality into an exchange of signs is also the first step towards franchising, as illustrated by the concept of the “database animal” coined by Hiroki Azuma. It refers to the serialization of storytelling into individual aesthetic components such as character, costume, prop, slogan, weapon, flourish, etc. The implication was that we no longer believed in grand, holistic narratives but rather invest our desire in cat ears, pleated skirts, and sailor fukus, also called “moe elements” where “moe” is slang for feelings of intense affection generated by such elements. This lent itself to the uncapped consumerism of cosplay, collectorship, and trivia. Web 2.0 commenced as fan wikis, blogs, and message boards sprang up to index and circulate an influx of functionally trivial information that lacked the fundamental spirit of lore.
K-pop, the most savage and gamified form of art and capital mergers in modern history, heavily borrows from this concept. Unlike the American pop industry where revenue is primarily generated from records and touring, K-pop’s licensed and bootleg merchandise industry nearly surpass the marketability of its music. The most essential unit of K-pop merchandise is the photo card, which is simply a pocket sized, printed photo of a K-pop member—a passive commodity hosting an aspirational, Godlike presence. The highest priced photo card to ever be sold, displaying Jungkook from BTS, went for $3,213. Minor difference becomes a commercially advantageous feature of “moe”, yielding infinite permutations against a familiar backdrop. K-pop datasexuals feel intense enamor towards the smooth, glossy photo card capturing the smooth, glossy affectation of their idols, punctured by a compulsive tic to exhaust all permutations of hair, makeup, outfit, accessory, expression, etc. The excruciating gap between themselves and the frictionless prototype of themselves stored sacred in the photo card’s pristine commodity sets off an endless chain of unconsummated and deferred desire. This is the central lever of consumption that drives billions.
Reddit user EvieThePixieʼs K-pop photocard collection.
Byung Chul Han posits that in a procedural rather than an end state, what is additive is not narrative, and thus eludes memory and in the long term, history. While some archives may organize data to elucidate a world-historical narrative, the “photo dump” and K-pop photo card collection skillfully evades the question of its own historical importance by cloaking itself in its own relativity and reflexivity. Today, there are less and less images that stand in and for itself above this relativity, that dare to be uncomplicatedly beautiful in a self-contained way. Maybe these provisional forms represent a hollow obsession with signaling difference and flashing referents, and thus beauty’s non-essentiality in modern culture at last. Due to predictive algorithms and AI modeling, visual cultural shifts that take place on social media and in pop culture have become increasingly frenetic, minute, and individual to specific users in a manner that eludes discourse.
But both phenomena speak to an innate desire for images that persists after AI—not only for creating them, but for blowing up their proportions via their serialization, broadcasting, circulation, and mimesis. Desire lends itself to increasing its own duration and size—to spread like a surface, to numerate like stars, to circle back around on a carousel. It asks to be articulated on the spot and then after the fact, again and again, sometimes until it’s twisted into a new beast. While this desire may be “manufactured” by mass marketing and algorithms, and nefarious tech conglomerates stand to gain tremendous sums from extracting our data-driven and data-producing desires, Lacan would retort that all desire is manufactured, anyways, as “desire is always the desire of something else.”