What’s the Vibe?

Everything’s Fucked

What defines the times? Ours feel particularly fraught. So many different crises are compounding at once that instead of listing each one individually—economic turmoil, war, resurgent fascism, AI, not to mention the species-level existential threat posed by climate change—some commentators simply say we’re living through “polycrisis”.[1]

In the abstract, the concept of the “polycrisis” might be relatively easy to grasp: lots of different things are breaking all at once. We feel their material effects in our everyday lives. But they also have an epistemic correlate.

As our certainties crack up under crisis’s constant pressure, and as our visions of how reality ought to be drift ever farther beyond the horizon of expectation, we can’t help but feel utterly unmoored, left without a clear sense of what the future has in store—or where shelter might lie.

This is a kind of epistemic derangement, a decoupling of ways of knowing the world from a world continuously defying how we expect it to be. Or, as Adam Tooze puts it in one of his substacks, the “knowledge crisis” that attends polycrisis, “the gap between inherited critical theory and the radicalism of the present”.[2]

Whether one identifies as a Tooze bro or not, this observation captures our struggle to make sense of what Stuart Hall called “the conjuncture”,[3] or the social, political, economic, and ideological—and, of course, environmental—forces that are shaping the times. The old critical-theoretical frames aren’t giving us purchase on this confluence of crises, and we haven’t quite figured out what frames we need to give them shape.

This unmooring is epistemological, in part, because it defies conceptualization. It’s also epistemological because it exceeds material determination. It’s not just that our worlds feel like they’re falling apart; this feeling, of worlds falling apart, is a very real condition that we lack the conceptual tools to fix in place or explain away. Reality’s parts aren’t adding up to a whole.

With the caveat that polycrisis, like the future, is unequally distributed—climate change or war or fascism or economic or technological changes land differently where I am, in London—it feels like we’re living through a “vibe shift”.

While it feels kind of dumb to bring “polycrisis” and “vibe shift” together, there’s something about the term vibe that makes it useful for grappling with the times—and with forms of art-making that exemplify aesthetic modes of engaging with a world that doesn’t quite cohere.

I Dream in 3d

Technology plays a particular role in this material and epistemic fragmentation. One of the conditions of being in the world in the present is to be caught in unremitting streams of, if not information, then at least content. In 2013, Hito Steyerl proclaimed: “The internet is dead!”—not because it’s expired, but because it’s “all over”.[4] Once it spread into every aspect of our lives, becoming not only a means of communication but essential to the basic infrastructures of living, making any distinction between real and virtual seems trite.

This inflects what it means to make art or to engage with aesthetics. Living, being, plays out through media of all kinds. We’ve become our prostheses; our senses, literally how we feel, know, parse, and orient ourselves in the world, are often as not delegated to inter-networked machines.

Art’s a part of this. We find stuff to look at through our feeds, in amongst all the other mess of content that we have to wade through in our distracted gleaning. More than this, we sense via our technical extensions. It’s not just that we might use a map app to get from point A to B. Sometimes, I catch myself daydreaming in 3d, the physics of my mental wanderings rendered Unreal by years of immersive conditioning.

Works of art that use game engines are real indexes of this fragmented and mediated sensing. In them, we sometimes find whole, coherent worlds: Lawrence Lek’s scripted and soundtracked total works, say, create logically coherent spaces for singing satellites (Geomancer) or depressed driverless cars (Black Cloud) to inhabit. Sometimes, though, we find something else: practices that tune in to the circulating, proliferating fragments—orphaned bits of reality—that define the times.

On the other side of artistic practices of world building, which borrow from sci-fi and fantasy to compose holistic, self-contained realities in which narratives can take root, this other kind of practice tunes in to vibes.

Refuse.exe

I’ve just spent ten minutes watching a 3d animated figure masturbate into a corner of a rundown flat on a large screen in the Tate Britain.[5] I’m not quite sure what I think of this yet, so I keep moving. I round the corner in this survey of Ed Atkins’ work and come face to fin with a series of flopping, animated fish falling from the sky.

The fish—tuna, I think? Not my area of expertise—twist in the air in front of an off-white background, not schooling, each lost in its own slow, simulated flounder. They smash into a pile of other trash, thrashing tails disturbing the discarded and destroyed objects around them. Their flailing impact throws up a cloud of dust and debris. I can’t recall what’s next—bones? A cabinet? An anchor? Tires?—but each falls, one after the other, into the pile, adding to the increasingly large heap of wreckage on the screen.

That’s all Refuse.exe is: a sequence of objects falling from the sky and crashing to the ground.[6] The wall text tells me that this isn’t a video. It’s a live simulation, created using Unreal Engine, that creates a different pile of debris each time depending on how the physics engine resolves each impact.

I go and look at some of the other works in this survey, but I keep coming back to this one. It’s funny in a way that only jokes that overtly telegraph their punchline but deliver it anyway can be: it’s falling! smash! It’s also mesmerizing. In it is an entire technical apparatus, the 3d game engine, reduced to a couple of constituent parts: physics, form, space, and light.

These are all the bits you need to draw a line out of this world and into another: to build a reality that is coherent yet conforms to entirely different rules. Only instead of building, Atkins uses this live simulation—and all the resource and compute that implies—to stage the destruction of a set of arbitrary objects simulated out of this one. It’s funny, and kind of silly, but it’s also a vibe.

In Flower, a slim, diary-like volume of observations and confessions, Atkins has a passage about how he often treats the men—they’re often men—his videos simulate as “dead”: his “dead men are enchanted artificial corpses with a felt lack where a life might have been” who are “made dead in order” for him, and by extension, us, to “model feelings otherwise unavailable outside of losing someone close to you for real”. This, he says, is “a boon of the excessive, disgusting realism in [his] videos and the fact that they’re made of: data, and then light”.[7]

These statements help us make sense of works like Old Food, which simulate what are presumably medieval-era peasants running through rustic scenes and weeping. But they don’t make these scenes resolve into whole worlds or coherent realities. These worlds are idiosyncratic, recessive: there’s no there to enter, nothing but an oftentimes quite bathetic affect that we’re invited to either sit with and take on or reject. In other words, they help us to tune in to the vibe Atkins creates.

Elsewhere in Flower, in a bit on how he can’t bear to look at images of his children lest he imagine them to be dead, Atkins writes: “Being realistic enough to the world and to myself is as close as it feels I can currently get to an externally relatable reality as a condition of truth.”[8] He’s confessing a deep emotional truth here, but he might as well be talking about Refuse.exe and flopping fish.

In a piece on Refuse.exe in CURA., Gareth Damian Martin notes that the “realities” simulated by video game engines like Unreal may “appear […] to be slick and glossy”, but they are in fact “fragile assemblages, their realities patchworked from proprietary technologies and ornate codebases, wrangled into performing strange illusions”.[9]

Martin’s piece is all about how game engines stage reality; Refuse.exe was originally conceived as a live event (abandoned for reasons of cost and safety: poor fish). It even starts with a sequence showing a red curtain opening before the destruction begins, to hammer home the point. In that piece, Atkins also tells Martin that, although Refuse.exe isn’t realistic, it nevertheless “rhymes with realism”.

The question is what realism is this? Whose? In Wish I Was Here, his “anti-memoir”, the British sci-fi author M. John Harrison claims that we’re in an “Age of Fantasy”, in which our tendency towards “storifying” everything contributes to what he calls “the mess” (and what I’m calling epistemic derangement). He goes on to write:

Refuse.exe stages the theatre of the real via Unreal means. The realism of the 3d game engine’s physics model, the world builder’s tool of choice stripped back to effects used to elicit minor, even disposable, affects. It’s less a staging of illusion than of a reality that’s been smashed to bits, a vibe conveyed via flopping fish: what’s left of our 3d dreams when they encounter a reality deranged.

What’s the Vibe?

So, what is vibe? Let’s start with the “vibe shift”. First used by marketers and forecasters to sift through rapidly changing fashion and lifestyle trends and to decide what’s likely to persist beyond the latest hype cycle,[11] it’s spread beyond that field and become something more. It gets at what might be felt but as yet inarticulable, what’s happening in the moment but hasn’t yet made itself explicable.

Vibes hum along above the (material) chaos of the present moment, registering change as it’s in process. To identify a “vibe shift” is to engage heuristically, making contingent propositions about the present that may or may not come good.

If we were to ask What’s the vibe?, we might say Everything’s deranged. That’s the big answer, a diagnosis of the times. But there are smaller ones, too. What’s the vibe? It’s a superficial question: something or someone, a thing or a place or a person or a scene, either has a good vibe or—it or they—don’t.

It’s a felt thing, an affective resonance that’s pre-cognitive, that resists easy explication, something that attends scenarios that aren’t yet fully resolved. In our moment, one defined by a lack of resolution into a coherent whole, vibes reign.

We can eschew the vibe and instead conjure spaces between what Harrison identifies between the real and unreal: do some world building to clear a ground that might be inhabitable.

Or we can try to tune in to the vibes that don’t quite fully resolve, that don’t fully let us in.

Sucked into Brainrot

Most Dismal Swamp’s new exhibition is taking place in a repurposed garage in South London.[12] The main attraction is The Bastard Fields, a new film. It’s the opening, and the crowd blends in with bizarre objects used in the production of this piece: an animatronic skeleton in a hoodie reclining on a scuffed pleather couch; a childlike mannequin wearing a sloth mask laid out in a vitrine on the floor; a banner with a creepy Donnie Darko-like bunny figure; a quite horrific beast mask.

These objects, presented like artefacts or like relics, populate the “multiuser shared hallucination” that Dane Sutherland and his co-conspirators construct via the Most Dismal Swamp handle. There’s something antediluvian about them, almost fey, like they’re artefacts dug out of pits in a world that could be this one (but isn’t quite). They’re made into more than they otherwise would be, these objects, imbued not so much by how they’re presented but by their weirdness.

The film’s metal soundtrack wafts over the crowd from the screening in the back, the kind that’s portentous but also driving and energetic. We’re jammed into the space because it’s pissing down outside. A waiter hands me a little bamboo bowl of chicken, peppers, and couscous—bland, but I’m hungry.

The Bastard Fields is hard to describe. It opens with a 3d animated sequence of three mo-capped figures in a dystopian version of streetwear, bulked out by hoodies and baggy combats. It’s soundtracked by a lullaby, though, the disjunction deliberately beguiling and alienating.

There are other sequences, which veer back and forth between 3d engine, real-life actors, and puppets, some filmed in the space we’re in: two ravers escorting a fey creature through a park; a demented rabbit vlogging his feelings about being hunted from a hi-tech warren; a demonic preacher railing over the top of more metal music; an animatronic skeleton having an existential chat with a 3d animated bog angel in a cave. But the one that I can’t shake is the sequence with this angel in the film’s first chapter

After panning around those three dystopian figures, the camera zooms out to show us a decayed bog body immured in sludge and muck. It locks on, showing us this body in parts: a skeletal face, hair remnants licked by wind; a decay-darkened foot, partially covered by a burial shroud; a bare clavicle partially bisected by a length of rope. It’s kind of sinister but also kind of sad: melancholy, in the poetic sense.

A narration picks up its inner monologue. Here’s a sample: “soured dregs of perception collect in the empty corners and palsied vectors of whatever dream has mercifully replaced my waking self.” The language is outmoded but also incantatory: all iambs, made opaque but also weighty by the liberal use of words with roots in old English or Scots dialects. It’s chanting us into the swamp.

What reality am I in right now? I feel like I’ve been sucked into brainrot, the very excessiveness of the exhibition’s scene inversely related to the intricate involutions of the work. I think I’m supposed to be beguiled by these dank aesthetics just as much as I’m not supposed to be able to make them make sense. The vibe doesn’t resolve, but I’m tuned to it anyway.

We Get the Angels We Deserve

In a conversation with Sutherland at my work,[13] he talks about constructing scenarios in his films and exhibitions that meet with things—objects, figures, characters, scenes—“on their own ontological pastures”. To quote him slightly out of context, these pastures are the “toxic commons” that constitutes our mediascape, which he conceives of as a “slopscape”, in which real and unreal, actual and imagined, fact and myth, are squeezed together into muddy slush.

In other words, the world of The Bastard Fields, the reality rendered by its mash up of fiction and 3d engine and animatronics and puppetry, is ours, taken on (at least some of) its own terms. It’s the reality of derangement experienced via the internet and its constantly churning content streams.

Contrary to the usual image of the internet as a space of flows and fluxes, constant streams and viral surges, though, it’s better to think of it as a segmentation machine. We massage little pieces of content to fit the parameters of the feeds we use to interface with a particular service. Each piece of content could be thought of as a communication or a piece of information, knowledge or data parcelled up and put into circulation. But each also has an aesthetic element and an affective charge.

Post after post after post after post after post might hit like news then joke then hot take then personal update then thirst trap; like atrocity then humour then offensive then heartwarming then attractive; horror and aversion and disgust blended together with cuteness and captivation and (whatever now passes for) beauty, while also conveying some kind of information about what’s going on.

But then, what’s going on in reality isn’t separable from these feeds. They’re at once real and unreal, bearing a fluctuating relationship to your measure of choice (the world, a ground truth, evidence, an ideology, et cetera). Or put another way, these feeds are braided through the real. In them, knowledge, feeling, seeming—all of what makes up contemporary being—gets mashed up and parcelled out into consumable chunks of content.

This description might make it seem like each little bit of content is disposable. In one sense, it is: if it doesn’t grab your attention, it’s likely already gone. But each little piece of content is also a little piece of world. Not the world, exactly—with Donna J. Haraway, I’m inclined to think of worlds as weird human-tech-nonhuman-culture hybrids.[14] Each is a part of a world, which may or may not be mine—or yours.

These segmentation machines aren’t the world. The pieces of knowing and seeming and feeling parcelled out by these segmentation machines are parts that are fragmentarily representative of wholes, rather than wholes contained in fragmented parts. Or: bits of reality. The thing about these fragments is that they don’t relate to the real (world) in a binary sense: real or unreal. That kind of relating requires a universal measure. Instead, once entered into the feed, these fragments of reality float free, ready for repurposing.

What I’m getting from The Bastard Fields, as it’s exhibited, is an unforgiving immersion in what Sutherland calls the “hostile architecture of our shared platform-mediated crises”.[15]

In that conversation, Sutherland invoked the “dark forest” theory of the internet: the idea, most comprehensively theorised by Bogna Konior, that the internet—and through it, our worlds as they are lived—have become adverse spaces, inimical to our being and our flourishing.[16] The natural response in the face of threat is to move stealthily through these spaces: to communicate—for Konior, it’s all about communication—in codes so as not to invite the ire of the platform itself.

In Sutherland’s work, the dark forest is replaced by a different figure: the rabbit warren, which is both a den and a defensive structure, designed to offer safety and confound intruders. This kind of work responds to derangement by speaking in codes and in tongues; its vibe is cryptic, recondite, oblique, but still feels all too real.

I can’t help but think of the bog body in the film as a kind of angel—Walter Benjamin’s angel of history re-rendered for deranged times.[17] It’s got skeletal stubs that look like mounts for wings, decayed relics of a more blessed age. This is reality, and the narratives that limn it and make it palatable, stripped of their mythic raiment and mired in our worlds’ muck, the segmented and parcelled out pieces of reality that are all that is left to us once they’ve been processed by the platforms that shape how we live and how we sense. We get the angels we deserve.

Vibe Engineering

What’s the vibe? Reality feels like it’s disintegrating; we’ve lost our epistemic bearings; our sensorial extensions feel, oftentimes, more real than anything else in the world. We could build other worlds to retreat into—a lot of us do.

But perhaps the alternative to freeing ourselves from entropy by seeking immersion is to understand that reality’s fragments, in their partiality and resistance to coherence, are a kind of material, too.

The vibe’s a felt thing but it’s also material that can be repurposed. Atkins’ and Sutherland’s work represent a kind of art-making operative in our fragmented times. Yes, they both use 3d game engines, but not only: also words, performance, found content, hallucinated scenes. They tune the fragments of the world they’re presented with—the as-yet-incoherent vibes they find—into something else.

For want of a better phrase, let’s call this tactic vibe engineering. This tactic isn’t limited to art-making: you find it not just in galleries but also in fiction, in performance, in online feeds, in the creation of online personae that may or may not correspond to real persons, in forms of branding that bring together elements to evoke a plausible scene, in scenarios grounded in distributed communication—chats, forums, content streams. You find it in politics, as engagement with reality and its problems gives way to provocations that stimulate reactions and responses.

I don’t have a grand theory of the present to offer. All I know is that it’s already cooked, and only getting worse. In lieu of that, maybe we can say that identifying this tactic might help us place art in a continuum with other kinds of making and being—and also with the sense of derangement, the crisis-riven mood, that defines the times and defies orientation. If we’re going to give shape to the conjuncture, we might start by taking these tactics seriously lest vibes’ reign suck us down even further.