Twin-project of 75 Tbps of (✿◠ω◠) ︻╦╤─
2020 - ongoing
The Kawayoku Inception aims to archive and shape under a new taxonomy contemporary digital elusiveness and the ultimate stage of violence sublimation.
With Kawayoku Inception I intend a new perspective of questioning the way we are used to elaborate violence in the realm of human visual perception.
The environment of such investigation is of course, the internet, a bristly meadow that breeds our digital lives, our atomized lonesome online experiences daily imbibed by incalculable quantities of images we are incessantly, (un)voluntarily over-exposed to.
Kawayoku is an imperfect linguistic crasis freely taken from Japanese language
Kawaii > cute + Bōryoku > violence
(scilicet the term has no pretense to be linguistically correct, it just sounds nice)
The Kawayoku in a gist
The scale of Abomination
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The layers of this unsettling ecosystem, a weird compost of livings in between cute aesthetic and digital war propaganda are accumulating undisturbed, stored/buried under trillions of neurons or terabytes of data collection.
Some contents might simply pass as mere irony, accidental weirdness, usual Internet cringe, or inoffensive isolated cases destined to be forgotten under further layers of convulsive digital image production.
Possibly we cannot conceive violence immune to aesthetical and political implications : what moral effects, visual impact, social consequences can we foresee, forestall or evade facing an underhand pervasive, hyper-sexualized militarization of public, accessible and worldwide popular digital platforms?
Translation : "Hey, oni-chan! Did you know that gypsies make up only 9% of the population, yet they commit two-thirds of the crimes? But that's the huge overrepresentation! Sure enough, the almighty oni-chan!"
Source > r/cringepics public advertisement in Hungary
(28th June 2020)
Starting from a research on wholesome memes the Kawayoku project landed on unsettling online realms where ambiguity expands, the obsessed gaze for female bodies and anime characters intertwines with exaltation for guns and weapons within gaming and pro-gun communities, Kawaii aesthetics conveying death threats or becoming a sort of art-therapy to elaborate child abuse and self-harm.
Ultimately the research covers a growing portion of social media where soldiers, reservists, veterans and Armies run official accounts to bring military into ordinary,
promoting dominant discourse to reinforce militaristic policies and strategies through familiar idioms for the Gen Z and other kinds of palatable representation for a global audience.
through personal selection criteria.
Fragments from the Archive
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So far the projects developed a visual digital archive of nearly 32.000 images, videos, screenshots, memes, reels etc. able to trace and give shape to the phenomenon of digital militarism, online platforms’unconventional propaganda strategies entangled with cuteness and hypersexualization.
The Kawayoku Inception is an ever-expanding archive model: it grows according to the ecosystem of micro and macro Internet communities it explores.
The archive is the starting point that developed a speculative hybrid laboratory on the contemporary mutation of violence in online visual cultures, that aims to foster radical imagination and critical thinking applied to artistic processing and visual representation offering a combination of investigative and analytic methods for a hands-on experiment with a paradoxical futuristic design.
My area of research examines and interconnects :
- memes and consumeristic trends related to the culture of cuteness
- aestheticization of vulnerabilty, tenderness and childlikeness
- the objectifying gaze for female bodies and anime characters intertwines with exaltation for weapons within gaming and pro-gun communities or in support of rape culture amongst online forums, imageboards and public channels
- Kawaii aesthetics working as art-therapy to elaborate child abuse and self-harm, detonation of violent graphic contents (or ideologies), leverage ambiguity and unsettlement
- Official Armies accounts to promote dominant discourse to reinforce militaristic policies and unconventional recruiting putting their own spin on internet phenomena (i.e. retooling the language TikTok viral trends and Instagram “thirst traps”)
Freely navigate
The Kawayoku Archive - visual interface board from Miro
At the moment the archive is available for consultation on request
Pls send an inquiry to 75tbps (at) gmail.com specifying the reason of your interest and your background,
otherwise the request will be declined
The Kawayoku Inception is intended to revolve around and get in touch with
a community of pundits, amateurs, independent researches, artists, students,
anyone down to join this permanent observatory on abomination
In March 2022 my research has been selected to be hosted on a conference + laboratory
and become the main theme of the sixth edition of Festival DONE Festival at
Fotocolectania, Barcelona
The public speech
The 75Tbps/Kawayoku laboratory has been hosted during
DONE6 Festival at Fotocolectania, Barcelona, Spain
The laboratory aimed to provide participants with tools to :
• Explore and archive extreme areas of contemporary visual cultures
• Learn documentation tactics of ephemeral digital materials
• Develop critical reflection on new forms of propaganda
• Using found materials for performance or speculative design
The Kawayoku educational tool
The Kawayoku Political Compass
The Kawayoku Political Compass
has been featured on do.no.research platform (15/2/2022)
The political compass is the result of a grotesque at times disturbingly realistic experimentation of remixing imaginaries that are emerging but reluctant to be filed under our usual taxonomies : on the horizon stands the rise of a new alien planet, whose physical laws alternate tensions between human rights violations and OnlyFans streamers, unboxing and sniping, #pewpew and #militarycurves, war and ahegao.
Axis
Annihilation | Salvation | Utopia | Underworld
Every area take inspiration from micro or macro visual culture or spotty news belonging to online popular subcultures.
To name one : top right area "UWU WAR CRIMES" refers to when in 2020 the U.S. Army Esports Twitter had commented UwU 💕 in response to plushies pictures shared by Discord.
UwU is an emoticon indicating cuteness, used since 2005 mostly amongst anime fandom forums.
"This (episode) marked the start of an onslaught against the Army group, which for some, occupies a morally gray area because it is seen as a method to recruit gamers for war through video games and cutesy internet speak. One top response to the Tweet, for instance, reads, “uwu pwease enwist and commit waw cwimes uwu.”
This way of typing emulates how cute female anime characters spell words.
"Since then, folks have started to try and speedrun how fast they can get banned from the Discord, in a troll-ish attempt to protest its existence and recruitment efforts. The most popular method, as showcased by Twitter user @Aurum_Corpus, involves linking the Wikipedia page for war crimes committed by the United States" *
To remember that since 17th November 2020 U.S. Army Esports Discord server is open only to :
Active Duty, National Guard Reserve, Veterans, DOD and DA civilians, Contractors.
The moderators thus justified the limitation in participation to their server : "We apologize for the inconvenience, but this is a necessity to provide a healthy and meaningful gaming community to our service members".
*From "The US Army is losing the war in Discord" by P. Hernandez on Polygon, July 2020
The research has been further expanded as an article featured
on Futuress platform in April 2023.
This article was originally researched and written in 2021, prior to its publication in 2023.
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