Welcome to the CყႦσɾɠҽσιʂιҽ
An interview with BBB_'s allapopp and Alex Sahm
Welcome. You’ve just been committed to Robear Rehab — a rehabilitation centre for those suffering tech-related traumas in our near cyborgian future.
A utopian/dystopian universe (depending on your disposition) created by artist duo BBB_, Songs of Cyborgeoisie is a sprawling work of music, art, performance, and design. There’s even a face filter that I posted on the QC Instagram way back in July 2022; it’s been a long-term project, culminating this week in the official release of their titular video game.
I had the pleasure of interviewing BBB_’s allapopp and Alex Sahm about the project. We get into the nitty gritty of building this fantastical universe, including their inspirations behind the cast of cyborgian characters, their process of composing music for an array of mediums, the inclusion of a tarot card deck, and, as this is Queer Computer after all, where queerness sits within the work.
To kick things off, I’d like to ask about the portmanteau: ‘Cyborgeoisie’ — ‘cyborg’ and ‘bourgeoisie’. What does it mean to be the cyborgeoisie in this world?
Alla: The portmanteau of the "cyborg" and "bourgeoisie" refers to the setting of our audio-visual sci-fi opera and computer game, "Songs of Cyborgeoisie." Songs of Cyborgeoisie is an umbrella name for a project which includes a music album, an interactive live opera, a deck of tarot cards and a computer gaming experience, which evolves in the course of the 12 levels and corresponding album songs.
Alex: This universe is where technological, organic, and fantastic beings come together to share their sorrows and hopes in order to heal the space of imagination from pervading techno-dystopian narratives.
Alla: The title "Cyborgeoisie" implies that there is a certain class of cyborg beings who are more privileged than the other inhabitants of the universe, and that there is a futuristic society in which technology and capitalism have merged to create a new ruling class. While the story told through the "Songs" does not specifically focus on the class issue, it naturally exists within this status quo, reflecting on the human world of today and possible tomorrow. The story occupies itself with the future as a phenomenon that is shaped by conditions of, visions from, and actions in the past and present.
Can you tell me more about the world-building process behind Songs of Cyborgeoisie? Where did this idea come from?
Alla: Songs of Cyborgeoisie is a very personal story. The opening character of the story is the Hologram, which consists of Alex's and my bodies grown together as one. These holographic bodies of ours have been featured in our previous projects like BBB_Fully Accessible Body (2018) or the Under_the_Sun_2120 (allapopp 2020), so in a way, it's a legacy storytelling.
The initial idea was to write a story about how a newborn artificial intelligence would see a utopian future world. But while writing this initial story, Alex and I quickly realized that our imagination is trapped within these dystopian blockbuster narratives and cliches. Nowadays, in contrast to the sci-fi imagination of the early and mid-20th century, it is impossible to imagine any utopian future. This is because those utopian visions, which modern technology is driven by, have become real-life dystopias under the influence of neoliberal logic, surveillance, capitalism, and the ongoing race for global dominance between the East and the West.
So instead of telling the story about an AI vision of the future, we invited our Hologram on a healing journey of empathy and self-reflection. The Hologram character is the only representation of humans in the story, and we believe humanity needs to acknowledge its traumas and accept the complexity of the world, before it will be able to envision any new utopian futures and their technologies.
It was the first time that we attempted to write a story with a linear narrative. Our starting point was an emotional journey of someone who’s going through the process of realizing, accepting, and working through a trauma, so almost each song/story/level is narrated from a perspective of a different character and is charged with different emotional state, from frustration into anger, through a psychotic episode, to apathy and release. It is actually one journey of the Hologram, which at the end arrives back in Robear Rehab and is healed because they’ve learned to empathize and navigate complexities.
Can you tell me more about the Queer Feminist AI character featured in the music video. What inspired her story in the project?
Alla: Queer Feminist AI actually go with they/them pronouns! They look like the Ex-Machina, but the tunnel in which the game level and the music video takes place also includes memories/references to movies “Her”, “Ghost in the Shell” and other general references to representations of femme robots, usually presented as female villains, personal servants or sexual objects. With the visual similarity to the Ex-Machina and easily recognisable references, we hoped this one could be an entry-level character into the complex and multilayered, references and philosophical ideas filled, project.
Each of the characters in the story has a trauma, caused by human fear of themselves and of technologies they create. One can find these descriptions in the corresponding levels of the computer game.
How did you decide on the other characters for this story? Were there any specific inspirations that informed the creation of these characters?
Alla: The story begins with the Hologram, who are feeling depressed because the future seems dystopian and they cannot escape this mindset. The Hologram are searching for a rehab center in hopes of healing from this negative state of mind. They arrive at Robear Rehab, where they meet other characters who are archetypes of modern technologies. These include Robear, inspired by Japanese care robots; the queer feminist AI, who try to break free from socially prescribed roles; the aggressive BigDog, who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder due to the abuse inflicted by their creators from Boston Dynamics; and the Narcissistic Algorithm, who believe that with enough BigData and logical thinking, it is possible to answer all the big questions and gain control over the human world.
These characters and references were either recycled from our past projects, or inspired with works by James Bridle's "New Dark Age" (2018), Franco "Bifo" Berardi's “(Sensitive) Consciousness and Time: Against the Transhumanist Utopia" (2019), Yuval Harari's "Homo Deus" (2015), and Aaron Swartz's "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto" (2008).
In the second part of the story, the characters and settings offer different perspectives on the world and inspire different kinds of technologies and ways of coexisting. The Other Intelligences, inspired by James Bridle's ideas, remind of the disregarded forms of intelligence that exist in the organic world. Meanwhile, the Hopeful Bacteria, who live within the gut, remind that human self-perception as a single individual is not accurate and that the human body is actually a colony of living beings.
While there is a linear storytelling in the narration, the story does not develop in a linear timeline. In the sixth level, we drift off into a fantasy universe, which can also be called a spiritual revelation. During this time, the Narcissistic Algorithm realizes that their perfect logic has a glitch and goes through a whole trip (in a sense of acid tripping) through the Other Intelligences and Hopeful Bacteria narration before returning to Robear Rehab as a healed Hologram.
The songs themselves do not contain the narration of the story but are charged with the emotional states and references to theories and philosophies relevant to the theme of the character and their song.
Can you walk me through the process of composing the music for Songs of Cyborgeoisie? How did you balance the different musical styles and influences in the album, as both a performance artwork and as an album in and of itself?
Alex: At the beginning of the writing process for "Cyborgeoisie," we developed the music and narration for the piece very closely together, so the soundtrack is like the core part of the project. Most importantly for me, each song needed to express a strong theme and emotionality. Even if you didn't understand all of the stories, languages, and theoretical discourses in the lyrics, you could still follow the emotional dramaturgy of the piece and have an experience on a different level. It has always been my dream to make a very genre-diverse album, and having this strong concept and storyline gave me the freedom to employ many musical references to support the storytelling without losing track of the coherence of the album.
Musically, the overall agenda of the album is to blend organic, electronic, mindfully composed, and algorithmically generated sounds into a single symphony and give each its own aura of being "alive" and having a place in the world. I am especially proud and happy about the chance to collaborate with the wonderful Deniza and Lisa from the Ukrainian-Russian choir ensemble Polynushka, who teamed up with Santrra and Sandy, two incredible vocal artists as well. The choir is like the soul of the soundtrack and always appears in the storyline when a shift of perception is occurring.
How does the interactive aspect of the gaming experience differ from the experience of listening to the album or watching the music video? What unique elements does the gaming experience bring to the project?
Alex: The gaming experience, which we shorten to just “game” is in the first place a visual experience of the album, one that allows a greater immersiveness and a form of storytelling, which is not told in words. Like a 60-min music video, where the player themselves control the camera angle and can explore the universe by walking around. At the beginning of each level a little quest is given to the player, which contextualizes the happening and invites one to either think in a certain way while walking around, or to interact with the characters. The game, the way it's built and its visuals is the closest way to experience the story of the Songs of Cyborgeoisie in a way how we mean it.
Visual narrative of the Songs of Cyborgeoisie is built on mainstream images and imaginations around technology that are influenced by literature, blockbuster movie industry and computer games of the sci-fi genre. It includes both character development and the visual world design, done in collaboration with the fantastic visual designer Lixing Yang and programmer Simon Klein.
This game is now released on https://homepage-bbb.itch.io/songs-of-cyborgeoisie and is free to download on gaming PCs which run on Windows!
How did you approach the creation of the tarot card deck and its connection to the project? How does it fit into the larger narrative of Songs of Cyborgeoisie?
Alla: We came up with the Tarot Deck after the story and the songs were written and the first live version of the game was done. When you sketch a whole world and then have to fit it into a 60 min album, or a live show or a computer game, it's just not enough. Tarot came up as a great medium to give space to further themes, but also leaving room for interpretation.
To enhance the audience's experience and create a tangible representation of Cyborgeoisie, we wanted to release our digital album with something fun and relatable that sparked conversations about technology, queer ways of life, and other questions raised in the story. We sought to encourage intuition and fantasy, rather than relying solely on academic, logical, and cognitive thinking.
My 14-year experience of conducting tarot readings using conventional decks made the decision to create the deck for this project intuitive. I incorporated subjects and archetypes from the Cyborgeoisie narrative and added themes that interested me. We then invited 30 friends and colleagues to illustrate the 78 cards, which I used to write the interpretations for all cards in the deck.
I also have ditched everything that I don’t believe belongs in the future — like hierarchies of the court cards, the common suit names and meanings, all of the major arcana archetypes, namings and places in the world that know of technology (which conventional tarots do not know about). But I did keep the deeper rooted login of the tarot in general — its essence to be a tool for self reflection. This deck is very precious to me, because it sort of became my brain at glance, all the subjects and themes, but also simultaneousness of the cards and the way they look, designed by the Teresa Schönherr — who did a crazy job on bringing all 78 super different illustrations together in one fantastic and catchy look, while also designing the UI of the computer game.
The Tarot Deck, together with the album are now available via bandcamp.
How do you see technology and queerness intersecting in your work? What potential do you see for technology to create queer futures?
Alla: The world of Cyborgeoisie doesn’t specifically handle the questions of queerness. Queerness is the new normal in the Cyborgeoisie, something that exists without a need to be justified, a status quo. There is a great power in world-building — you can imagine whatever you want and this is exactly what was needed — a space where this constant conversation with and presentation for cis-heteronormativity may stop. Most queer stories these days still exist within the cishet gaze and continue justifying its existence by queer readable presentation and arguments. It is important to continue doing so for visibility reasons, but it is also important to have spaces where one can just be, for me the setting of Cyborgeoisie is one of these spaces, where these characters just are queer.
Beyond the narrative of Cyborgeoisie, my favorite reference to the question would be the Glitch Feminism Manifesto by Legacy Russell. Here a possibility of the utopian queer technological future lays in the embracing of the glitch, of non-conformity and non-performance, as an antidote to norms coded into technologies which humanity has today — technologies which are designed and built with white, cis-male, able-bodied perspective in mind.
For technology to create queer futures, the technology itself needs to become queer first. For this more queer and FLINTA (german abbr. for Female, Lesbian, Intersex, Non-binary, Trans and Asexual) people need to participate in its ideation, design and implementation (ideally only queer and FLINTA people). But for this also there needs to be more entry points for queer people into the tech industry, more queer and FLINTA oriented education, more societal common sense and so on. The sector’s development is hyper fast, and the way is long, but walkable. In 2017 Alex and I founded the Techno Spiritual Center for Techno Spirituality for one of our performances. I was thinking we might need to reanimate it for better queer propaganda with a greater reach and commitment on the matter :)
