Divine intervention

I.

My romantic disposition is obvious. I drag my fingertips over textured pillars of old buildings, seal my letters with wax or stamps, choose perfume based on the notion of soul. This is why I have always felt at home in the physicality of analog and its clicks and textures — yearn for it, even, as our spaces continue to become more and more digitized. Knobs and buttons in cars, wristwatches, and even the POS at gas station pumps are being replaced with glossy touchscreens. Letter writing has long been replaced by instant messaging, and the ubiquity of content streaming has pushed physical media — which I enjoyed during the first half of my childhood — into antique stores and the realm of collectibles. At every turn we use the full capacity of our hands less and less to navigate common, everyday spaces and gestures.

I do sense the tide turning slowly, which may pick up with suddenness soon, towards analog revival. Non-digital media never really died despite all the bleak declarations, though I would be naïve to say it wasn’t close. There have always been artists and craftsmen who sustained these dying arts, and to them we owe a great deal, especially as a collective interest in analog seems to be on the rise. I see this first and foremost in myself, but also in increased sales of vinyl records, stationery, and film cameras. It’s in the abundance of events and workshops centered around analog creative practices and tactile experiences as we realize the vital nourishment in working with our bodies, and in the presence of other people.

These impulses are certainly enveloped in nostalgia, but the surprising catalyst for this shift is the proliferation of AI-generated content online. Generative AI recycles everything we have ever shared on the internet, turning genuinely funny, interesting, and even dubious human content into, at its best, something hollow, and at its worst, harmful and malicious, and as our encounter with these soulless pieces of media increases, so does our digital fatigue. Our desire for authenticity will resist the current in this sea of counterfeit content, and I think people will seek spaces that are untouchable by, or at the very least sheltered from, AI. There are many reasons to go offline, but escape from the wake of AI ouroboros may be the most compelling.

This doesn’t mean we will abandon our digital lives incompletely — as if that’s even realistically possible — only that we are gaining clarity about its limitations. What I initially perceived as a common hypocrisy on Substack, where writers like myself harp on about the value of being offline in an online forum, seems to me a now a push for possibility. The drive and desire to meaningfully reconcile our online and offline lives is in the air. When new, paradigm-shifting technologies rapidly came out in the last three decades, we were generally dazzled by the novelty and adopted most new systems and devices without question. Most of us didn’t know then what it would cost us: privacy, our attention, ownership, truth. I certainly didn’t think about it much. But now that the consequences are clear, there’s an emerging resistance to the passivity we have unwittingly assumed, and a recalibration of our relationship with digital and analog technologies. Neither is superior to the other, and the way forward may be a careful balance of the two.

This interest in analog, for instance, is nurtured within digital spaces. Online communities centered around a craft provide users resources and opportunities that may otherwise have been inaccessible for mere geographic reasons. Trends, problematic as they can be, can generate a surge of interest that, in some, may solidify into a lifelong practice. Myself, having grown up in a world so far from the arts, I may never have gotten into calligraphy or printmaking had I not seen videos of it on social media. Through free tutorials shared by generous practitioners, I learned to crochet, make stamps, bind books. I know my love for analog creative practices was enabled by digital spaces, even as they serve as analog’s contrast. More importantly, I am delighted by what happens when both technologies are intentionally used together in the creative process: scanning real textures to overlay on digital illustrations, editing music videos by printing and animating them by hand frame by frame, printing a cover for a book on digital humanities on the letterpress, projecting subtitles on a thin digital screen above the stage during an opera. For economic reasons, music streaming and e-books will continue to be a part of my life, but so will buying hard copies, especially those by independent artists. I am the farthest thing from a purist in anything, so witnessing the juxtaposition of things we once considered to be contradictory or oppositional excites me, because I do think this task requires a genuine curiosity about our changing world and a deep moral imagination to transform it positively. It also gives me hope that we haven’t collectively abandoned our human agency just yet, even as the path towards submission glitters chrome with frictionless convenience at the swipe of a finger. Magic is made with hands.

II.

When I first listened to Berghain, I nearly wept. The orchestral opening, the choral refrain, Rosalía’s operatic singing in German — I was moved by the ambition, the success she achieves in her transcendent pop project, and this grand sense of being understood.

Despite the language barrier, with the song lyrics predominantly in Spanish and German, I received the song with wordless clarity. Not unlike a religious experience, as clearly intended. Berghain is steeped in the sublime, that elusive simultaneity of pain and pleasure, despair and euphoria as it explores themes of love, loss, and salvation. Simultaneity and its effect is encoded in every aspect of the song: the decadence of the philharmonic orchestra and Catholic imagery vis-à-vis the title, a reference to a techno club in Germany; Björk’s ethereal interjection that Rosalía describes as akin to the parting of the sea; Yves Tumor’s closing declaration I’ll fuck you ‘til you love me that is all at once harsh, haunting, and desperate. Rosalía succeeds in weaving together the classical and contemporary in a way that isn’t just conceptually stimulating, but genuinely, truly beautiful. The song is an incredible experience.

I also couldn’t help but find in Berghain this convergence of analog and digital that I’ve been preoccupied with. The song, and reportedly the rest of the album which is separated into four movements, is performed with the London Philharmonic Orchestra — a bold classical influence in what Rosalía firmly asserts is a pop album, which the production clearly reflects. Jonathan Hill also pointed out that the opening violin solo was performed with a real instrument and digitally sped up to create that dramatic effect. I don’t have a good enough grasp of music to have discerned that myself, but I thought that was brilliant. That the LUX vinyl and CD also contain three exclusive songs unavailable on streaming, which elsewhere would simply be a marketing strategy to sell physical copies of the album, feels like a conscious intention of the creative project that mixes media, genres, and even languages. Even the imagery in the music video feels deliciously real and tactile — the archival fashion pieces, the ornately framed image of the sacred heart, the pawnshop she takes the golden locket to — while maintaining a dream-like, surreal quality throughout.

There is an obvious intellectual curiosity and spiritual depth in Berghain (and the entirety of LUX it seems, which reportedly contains 13 languages and is rife with literary and pop references) that is driven not by ego but a very real desire to find meaning. If Rosalía has to summon multiple sources — languages, collaborators, genres, cultures, texts — to find or create that meaning in this alchemical musical feat, then so be it, it seems. How else is one supposed to do so in a milieu defined by a flood of information delivered through algorithms that demolish old ways of perceiving place and time? She seems unafraid to draw from the world and skip over chasms and fractures as she deems fit — hence the claims of cultural appropriation that have followed her throughout her career, which is a separate, more complex conversation — and in doing so, I think she made something revelatory in Berghain. Of what, we have yet to see.

Reconciliation of all our fractures, personal and collective, will, as Björk sings, be done through divine intervention. There seems to be a touch of this divine — moral imagination — in LUX, and I humbly, eagerly receive it with cupped hands.