devblog / friday 300922 (Patreon)

Wow. September 2022. It’s like the film Speed. But Dennis Hopper is a metaphpor for capitalism. And Keanu Reeves is also a metaphor for capitalism. And Sandra Bullock is a metaphor for capitalism. And all the people on the bus at the mercy of the protagonists are a metaphor for the economy. And then the actual bus that kept all of them alive but then eventually explodes into a giant fireball once the economy is safe is a metaphor for us. WE ARE THE SPEED BUS. 

THE LUDDITES WERE RIGHT

First things first: this patreon subscription remains paused. You will not be charged for October. Greetings, new September-subscribers! Happy to have you here, please do dig into the archives during this hiatus and DM us if you want Bandcamp codes for any of the the releases.

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BREAKING NEWS: the Haus Horo e.p. is out TODAY! This is Rob’s new band. You'll hopefully already be a fan of them after their debut single came out not long ago. Now their debut e.p, Salvation, is available on their Bandcamp. Do yourself a favour and grab a copy, support the longevity of this noise-goth colossus, and end your experience of September 2022 with an appropriate soundtrack.

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We’ll be honest. This month’s update is being written right up to wire and so it’s perhaps not going to be the laser-focussed communique of righteous fury and wit you have come to expect. There’s a bunch of unformed ideas swirling round about the state of the 65LABS project that need to get pulled together about possible ways to move it forward, but it’s not going to happen this rainy Friday afternoon. So let’s just say this: the success of the 65LABS experiment has also caused its own paralysis. How do we add to infinity? How do we stop it? How do we move beyond it?

So in lieu of any major news to update you with (apart from the hastily added Haus Horo drop!), and with the aim of trying to capture some kind of loose trajectory of where the 65LABS R&D Wing is taking its inspiration from, here’s a couple of books that are currently informing our thinking:

The titles speak for themselves really. The luddites were right, A.I is facist. We already suspected this, that's sort of why Wreckage Systems exists in the first place. Tech-solutionists 65LABS staff are not. Still, it's good to have more literary types give our confused thoughts a bit of weight and clarity. Check them out if you want to play along with the grand 65 masterplan of making-it-all-up-as-we-go-along, and like your reading to be quite bleak.

Every new day brings a new tidal wave of tech bros declaring that their sweet little AI-generated pictures of spaceships are the future of art. WHAT DO YOU THINK ART IS? DO YOU REALLY THINK ALL IT IS IS CONTEXT-FREE PRETTY PICTURES?

Look, we’re not purists. Artists need tools. And they need to know how to wield them, but not necessarily know how they work on the inside. For example, we use distortion pedals. A lot. We don’t know how to make them. (Well, maybe Si does). But you know, we are using a technology, we give it an input, it transforms it in ways that we can loosely predict but not precisely guarantee, and gives us an output in the form of noise. Hopefully it is immediately glorious noise, but if it’s not, we iterate on our input (i.e - we move reposition our guitars around the amplifier to find the sweet spot for feedback), until it sounds good.

So sure, similarly if these people insist that there’s an art to crafting the perfect prompt to make decent AI images then that’s fine. Well done. Call the output art by all means. We’re not the gatekeepers of that. But, crucially: WHAT IS YOUR NEWLY MADE ART FOR? HOW DOES IT REFLECT ALL OF THOSE THINGS INSIDE OF YOU THAT THERE ARE NO WORDS TO DIRECTLY ARTICULATE, FOR WHICH YOU USE YOUR ART AS AN AESTHETICALLY PLEASING PROXY?

Whatevs. We're too close to the Friday deadline to get to the bottom of that right now... A.I is a minefield. It is an illusion of the future that does nothing but reenforce the structures of inequality that we are all (to wildly varying degrees) subject to. It doesn't offer new models on how to exist. It only bakes in our current, very flawed ones.

So yeah, maybe the luddites were right. But the problem we're left with here at the LABS is… it is relatively easy to understand how the luddites wrecked looms, but how do you wreck wreckage machines?

That's what we are still trying to figure out.

Ok. That's all for now. Take care of each other friends. And take some solace that, for once, we don’t need to say fuck the tories, because they finally appear to have truly fucked themselves.

65 Comms Team
NOISE SILO 4F
SYNTH MEADOWS
65LABS EASTERN QUADRANT