Strange Biomes:
Lingxiang Wu's Digital Landfill
written by _feature_creep_team_


_Wu’s ongoing interactive online work Digital Landfill (which is in fact two works in one, being linked, quite literally, to the work A Luminum Cloud) is an exploration into an aesthetic which retaliates against the “aesthetic of the smooth” which has come to dominate online spaces. It embraces everything which algorithmically reinforced capitalist platforms seek to obscure or eliminate in their attempt to maximize social and monetary capital. Where Neoliberal institutions seek to make the digital as streamlined as possible, (and to streamline us in turn, to better fit their networks) Digital Landfill instead turns away from smooth, easy consumption, and the mindsets most accommodating to it. Where Capital would have the digital become a lossless transmitter of value from us to them, Wu’s work instead seeks out the lost, and invites the viewer along for the journey.

_And what exactly do we find there? This is where my own exploration took me beyond Wu’s words about the piece. What exactly is the nature of this online landfill? This (non-)space of jagged edges, suboptimal forms, and algorithmically unfriendly movements?

_For starters, it’s quiet there. Quiet and sparse, in ways that only the digital still can be. It is also lonely, being a realm for solitary interaction. Despite these qualities, it’s oddly inviting, though not in any traditional sense. It has an internal logic which is apparent only indirectly, its landscape being internally consistent without offering any sense of recognition or commonality with an irl counterpart. It also feels nascent, without giving any clear hint as to what form or outcome it might one day be working towards.


_While built to reject the harsh digital realities of the neoliberalized net, it is also constructed upon and cultivated from the refuse of that world. If it is a seed for some new growth, which its open vistas, dense forms and organic, almost strand-like architectures seem to suggest, then what will actually grow from it?

_The digital has an almost unlimited potential for transformation, but also for reproduction; not unlike Carpenter’s The Thing. Carpenter’s creature was capable not only of rapid, cancerous growth, reconfiguring itself in ways no earthly being could, but also of perfectly mimicking the lifeforms around it, in both body and mind. The digital shares this same seemingly contradictory capacity, simultaneously opening new modes and radically transforming social realities, while also rapidly reproducing the ideological and material biases of those who construct and use it. Because of its lack of conventional physical, spatial and even temporal limitations, It is, at once, the greatest capitalist and anti-capitalist tool ever devised. Equally capable of liberation and degradation.

_Unlike Carpenter’s entity, which fluctuates between utterly alien and unnervingly human at breakneck speed, (sometimes literally so) Wu’s piece lives within a more subtle rhythm between the two. More landscape than creature, as if the frozen wasteland itself had been subsumed, rather than those who dwelt upon it. Appropriately then, its growth, its transformations and reproductions, seem to unfold at a more glacial pace. A pace which, itself, could be read as either more natural, (outside the clearly delineated and artificial timescape of capitalist existence) or merely as less human.

_It is a strange biome, equally fertile and virulent, ebbing and flowing between human, nature, alien; all according to logics uniquely its own. Uniquely digital.

_When we visit it then, the prospect of what might be evolving around us, (however glacially it does so) is quite unnerving. Will the jagged refuse of the “aesthetic of the smooth” bloom into a new, alien landscape of previously undefined potentials, or will it, as the digital on the whole has, simply become a breeding ground for further profit-extraction and control? Caught between the extremes of Future Shock and the inhuman machinations of Neoliberalism, either of which could lay just beyond its never-quite-arriving horizons, Wu’s Digital Landfill is a (non-)space well worth exploring. Just be careful where you step.