Miku-Multiverse-Summer!

 

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This is Berlin Miku. She studies art history in her 28th semester, goes to the club five times a week and has an astrology podcast. And after all she forgot her yoga mat at home before posing for this image.

Forget Brat summer, it is … it was (climate change?) Miku summer. At least for me. I wish it was. A short rush of passion for drawing helped me in my depressive desert of the real and enabled me to participate in a fun art trend on x, formally twitter, while practising in my sketchbook.

And i was not alone.

It all started with Brazilian Miku in short soccer tricot and hotpants – a brown-tanned, curly haired and cocktail-loving reinterpretation of the famous artifical tech-pop-icon and her long teal braids, who dares you with her spirit and a handsign to call her back. Many answered in resonance. Brazilian Miku quickly multiplied in her own image, but she also went abroad, presenting herself in a variety of traditional and stereotypical garbs, from Canada to eastern europe, from Australia to North Africa, from central europe to southeast asia. She became irish, korean, vietnamese, Mapuche, blue crab.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hatsune Miku became multitude, a legion of humanity. Deleuzes and Guattaris desiring machine reproduces itself in cycles of repetition and difference. The sign of Miku as an universal was repeated, but with each iteration she became more other to herself and found enjoyment in that process, networked through her identities AND unique in every expression. A rhizom, identity not as heritage alone but experiment and growth informed by heritage. Deleuze is often mistaken as a philosopher of postmodern arbitrariness or affirmative identity politics. He is better characterized as a post-postmodern philosopher already predicting the epistemology of data-culture and the digitized self of serialized identity and the conflicts of image in the 21th century.

 

The ethnicity of Miku is both molar and minor, while avoiding all the essentialism masquarading itself as identity these days. Though there have been attempts to capture Miku into nationalist and imperialist schemes (especially by Israel and Russia), the perpetrators have subsequently been called out, critized or confronted by counter-identities. Nationalist Israel-Mikus have spawned a plethora of defiant palestinian Mikus. Russian Mikus designated as slavic Mikus (refering to the panslavic narrative, Russia abuses to justify its imperialism) have been countered by a celebration of (friendly) difference among her eastern european neighbours as well as wartorn ukrainian Mikus celebrating their independence, stoicly joining the defense of the country or simply trying to survive/flee russian bombing of civil infrastructure.

This Miku-Multiverse was not merely a display case for nationalist mythology, but she loves our history and reflects it back to us. She was always among us. Artists and aspiring artists in general do not tend to romanticise their countries, but they like difference and the challenge of uniqueness. The molar, imposed on identities, with which nationality is usually linked, was constantly split open. No one could capture the universalism of Miku. Specific regions and cities produced their own identities (like my Berlin Miku). Historic garb is juxtaposed with down to earth cloth, drawn outside of the supermarket with plastic bags of groceries, doing chores at home or smoking after work, waiting for the bus. Belarusian and Russian and Russian Miku were arrested.

This is what going minor can mean. Meeting difference and hanging out.

 

Especially german Mikus tended to be drawn waiting for late trains, mildy annoyed at a country which sold its own future by writing austerity and divestment into its constitution while public infrastructure decays. Miku (Mika?) knows. The multi-identities of Miku are selfaware, tongue-in-cheek expressions of heritage. Real, not imagined unity in difference. They don’t mythologize and idolize their origin. But they also celebrate what we can give each other, what we can share in personality, culture and … yes … life. It is good that we are all different in similar ways and this does not have to be tragic or violent, even though it often is. But it can also be wholesome and funny.

Hatsune Miku after all embodies, what nationality should both be constricted and expanded to among rising tensions of stupifiying nationalism: Cloth, foods, beveridges … and being mad about the government. This is not what polarizes us. It is what we share. As humanity. A celebration of connective difference in difficult, interesting times (a chinese curse) refering, in melancholy, to an universal template.

Hatsune Miku is defiantly elusive. She transitioned. She became temporal Miku, dinosaur and cyanobacteria. She posed as coverart for the music we love and which unites us more than our passports, for Anime and Kaiju and Games. Even the void found her, ftaghn! Suddenly we saw her everywhere, even in the cockpit of an airplane.

 

Ofcourse like the depressive hedonism and party hauntology of brat summer (read Matt Colquhoun on brat summer here) this feeling is a nonplace, an utopia. But like Charli XCX frees mourning, the thousand faces of Hatsune Miku free our creativity through our heritage, without subordinating it to nationality, to passports. Therefore our art becomes duty free in an age of commercialisation and propaganda, of corporate data-thieves and canceled public internet archives.

The love Miku receives from artists worldwide and without prejudice, is especially remarkable concerning her birth as a mascot for the Software-Synthesizer Vocaloid2 in 2007. Despite being of machine tissue, artificial from her very origins, she inspired the raw craft of art making in contrast to lazy, ideological and stolen AI-Slop.

Maybe this blunt universalism was her secret all along. Difference can grow here without the baggage of memory. She is a canvas and therefore she will never be arrested for owning the wrong passport. In a deglobalisized, renationalized world this becomes pain, but sweet pain. Pain with black humour. Pain for what should be. Pain for what is.

A moment of joy, already out of time.

As Brazil’s supreme court led by Alexandre de Moraes ordered x, formally, twitter, to be shut down over concerns for the spread of desinformation during elections. Elon Musk (unsuprisingly) did not comply to an ultimatum and the site went offline in Brazil’s network. Since the news spread during the height of Miku season, this was memed by the trend as well and Brazilean Miku (who gave us this marvel of an social media trend) was declared dead, murdered even.

Joy like peace and time is fleeting, which is all the more reason to grasp every opportunity to feel it among all the violence of politics and stupidity of discourse.

Like Summer, the Miku-Multiverse came to an end with an abrupt realization of capture, but the world still belongs to her. It should. At least. The violence of climate change is felt in the distance like the violence of national conflict (at least from the perspective of the imperial core). We dance as already ghosts. To paraphrase Adorno: Art is best, when it embodies autonomy – defiantly … even if our efforts are futile and the moment that enabled these forms of autonomy in abstraction is long gone. Miku still abstractifies. 

We are maybe powerless, but we can resist nonetheless by choosing to forget we will be captured in end. By avoidance and rejection of the imperative to comply. Identity can never capture us. Like Miku we can be nothing and everything. The world belongs to her.

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Blind Sight – Cosmic Foolery – Speculation

Loki Estravens Kulturpoltergeistblog: Politics and Culture

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