After Sewerbot rises into the city to take revenge on the surface meat, Tish and Adam talk to Locust collective member and artist Omnia Sol and listen to material from their new album Sunshine Tapes. They discuss vaporwave, glitch art, NFTs (the “Funko Pops of digital art”), sabotage and strikes vs. scientific management/Taylorism as “glitch,” improvisation in glitch art, undermining capitalist conceptions of time, dérive and detournement in glitch and vaporwave, critical vs. fascist vaporwave, retro-futurism, the promises of utopia, the gothic vs. the nostalgic, Tik Tok music recycling, human vs. algorithm curation in digital media, anti-time travel tropes as bourgeois propaganda, the “spiritual” with and against the Christian concept of the Holy Spirit, Spinoza and animism vs. commodity fetishism, Walter Benjamin's application of theological concepts in Marxist cultural criticism, and more.
Artworks, artists, and texts discussed in this episode:
Omnia Sol, Sunshine Tapes, vol 1, vol 2, and vol 3 (2021) and TOSAS: The Omnia Sol Art Show (ongoing); “June 27th” and other work by the late DJ Screw; Neutral Milk Hotel; Acid Left/Adam Ray Adkins, “This is What They Took from Us,” meme (2021); Born Again Labor Museum, Don’t Jostle the Water Bears (They Are Communist NRG Beings Outside of Time) - digital prints, collage, painting, drawing, mixed-media, coffee, glitter, cotton and ash on canvas (2022); Local News, “Sports Champions” (2013); Tennessee Ernie Ford, “16 Tons” (1955); Michael Betancourt, Glitch Art in Theory and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2017); Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” Science as Culture, Vol 6 (1996); Grafton Tanner, Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts (London: Zero Books, 2016)
Locust Radio is hosted by Tish Turl and Adam Turl. It is produced by Drew Franzblau and Alexander Billet. Show music is by Omnia Sol. “Sewerbot” was adapted from a short story by Tish Turl, featuring Omnia Sol, Adam Turl, Tish Turl, and Alexander Billet.
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