heavy digestations

helloworldbyhd.net ‼️ Our self-published debut poetry pamphlet, 𝘩𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘰 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥, is now live via the link in our bio ‼️ More functional on desktop but readable on phones. You can expect mentions of things like pickles, dreams, birds, cigarettes, screens, lettuce, boobs, veneers, AI agents, tinned mackerel, peptides, sci-fi, water, afterlife. 🍐🤖🌊☁️🚬🐦💉💻🪄🦷

The boundaries are becoming blurry. Critics cross established but worn lines into promoters. Presence in the industry and therefore, proximity to the people that work within it, generate relationships between producer and critic. Neutrality is no more. Perhaps, critics have too much faith in their ability to remain impartial. Being close to the producer gives them an insight they misread for hard graft and premium quality. Their eyes do not meet those of the lowly staff that produce products in hot, windowless rooms. The well-known and well-documented face of the critic is flagged and the product they receive exists outside of the laminated and ringbound specs served to everyone else. Their judgment, from their first dalliance, has already been tampered with. Reputability in their shared fields of interest is one-sidedly superficial. Seeing themselves in one another decides the relationship though the signals of affability are constructed–purchasable indicators of attention to detail except they come from heavily curated showrooms and archives. The critics’ unwavering support prevents them from noticing the conveyor belt of new faces that greet them. They do not wonder what happens beyond the threshold. It is an unbridled trust in their own judgment more than it is blind faith in the other. Their relationship bleeds into the criticism of others–the producer has become a marker of excellence, a standard, goal, bar held over their heads with soft hands. By the critic, they are afforded originality for something they appropriate, awarded accolades for something they bought in, given props for products they do not produce, praised for reusing other people’s ideas, and allowed ignorance for well-documented mistakes. New producers are measured in comparison. Their handmade marketing is compared to participation in AI generated micro-trends, homemade products are compared to those ordered in, fresh compared to frozen. Costs are compared despite the above disparities in the production. The comparison, too specific and farcical, has become unnecessary. Other producers in the vicinity remain untouched, unmentioned, unspecified.

💜 Studio/Lab Artist Members @heavydigestations have been learning how to write space into existence–considering the poetics of computation and the fundamentals of the internet, they’re using web development languages to build static pages of post-humanist speculation to interrogate current modes of consumption. 💜 As an extension of their practice of interweaving digital and analogue ways of researching and making, their recent experimentation takes form as a poetry pamphlet, published as a webpage. Read the pamphlet here → helloworldbyhd.net 〰️ Their membership at Studio/Lab is supported by @anartistinfo Artists' Bursaries for research and development.

Whether or not an optional service charge should be added to the bill is debated on the news. A barista twirls off to pour the filter coffee you’ve just ordered while you decide what percentage of tip you’d like to leave. 10%? 15%? You feel around in your pockets, the crumby bottom of your handbag, leaf through the pockets of your wallet. From the bottom of the tote bag you use for food shopping, you pull out a loose pound coin and an onion skin. You put the pound on the tip tray because you don’t trust the company will disperse card tips fairly. You’re probably right. A couple at the table opposite say things like, tipping is an American thing and they’re getting paid aren’t they. You hear some gossip about a local chef that does TV appearances. Apparently he takes the tips for himself. Having worked as a restaurant manager, you’ve seen the tip system and the percentages tips are shared. You’ve seen how the managers that sit in the office with no contact with customers take the larger share of the money the customer left for their cook and waiter. As restaurants move into the digital creator space, opportunities for extra earnings and experiences are take by the owners. The guys that work from an office and have no recent or relevant experience in preparing food are serving it to the public at a special event. It’s marketing disguised as supporting a community. The content created is flashy. Their image is being rehabilitated, probably because they can no longer advertise jobs on facebook without ex employees warning people against applying. Their long hair dangles over the open containers, only enforcing hairnets for the kitchen staff. But a photographer will be there tonight to document their charitable contribution so why would they make a professional chef better suited to the task the face of their good deed. Anyway, their staff don’t have the recent collab of restaurant and generic fast fashion clothing company branded shirts and hats. They’d have to give the kitchen staff something for nothing. No, they’ll do it themselves. You tipped at the till, as prompted, but when you take a big bite you find a long brown hair in your food.

A content creator receiving criticism about his biases points out their critics follow count. The content creator tells them they’re jealous. The content creator proposed they create their own brand/review account/lifestyle page if they think they can do better. But the critics have not claimed to know better, do not promote themselves or their social media accounts to gain followers, are not jealous of the content creator. A chef works at a restaurant for years and years. His cooking doesn’t get any better. He’s become more brazen with time. The kitchen becomes an extension of his home. So he licks his fingers after handling food and doesn’t wash his hands. He leaves without cleaning. He takes every weekend off. His overt prejudices are excused. He takes home the highest percentage of tips, is never held accountable, and is described by his team as the best chef they’ve had. An arts organisation posts an open call. They receive a higher number of applications than expected when they set the date for responses to applications. They tell applicants there will be a delay in outcomes. They offer feedback to rejections but when the artist emails asking for the feedback offered they get no response. They email again. They do not receive a response. The accepted projects are announced and one feels very familiar. An artist wins an open call at a large institution/receives funding from a big funding body/is invited to show work at a major gallery. The work enters the public and the public responds. Nonprofit organisations, galley goers, critics, and artists with substacks write their response on free to read platforms, in zines, behind paywalls, in the visitor book. Artists release statements about their works intentions while criticising the viewers right to dislike the work.

Quick fire april faves Chance to Bleed by @kurtvile 666 Number of the Beast comic bought at Bluecoat Book Market Freezing Point by Anders Bodelson Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup with preserved mustard greens Earl grey tea Jhol momos from @momosliverpool @sanssince1966 Persepolis by marjanesatrapi Self-defined, new stories from the archives at @openeyegallery 8 page zine

Instead of fulfilling the jobs requirements, lower paid staff members must now take on the role of team punching bag. Prey need not be the least qualified but must be patronised to maintain equilibrium. If the team makes any sort of mistake, they must accuse their designated scapegoat. It is ideal that the victim chosen belongs to a group that already experiences oppression and discrimination. An event will be held about artist led spaces, led by a ghost. This trustee, I mean ghost, only in name, never shows itself to squealing studio members or volunteers, never prowling the empty corridors or intercepting emails. His service to artist led spaces buried with him and dug up only to host hypotheticals, debating a ship he left sinking, and curating what he’d avoided. Instagram influencer with AI profile picture appropriates a regional peasant dish he has no connection to. Despite proximity to peasants, he doesn’t ask them for the recipe, choosing instead to explain to them the better way to make it which apparently requires ingredients the peasants don’t have access to. Bored with that he tells them about where he’s going on holiday this weekend. Chalk boards illegible, rubbed and written on depending on the Chef’s fancy instead of surplus stock. Specials were once code for using up ingredients but, like everyone else, Chef’s are outsourcing their thinking. Swapping inspiration for imitation. Specials are soaked in hot honey, slopped in katsu, rolled in zataar. The ingredients are more expensive because they’re out of season. Wires that aren’t connected to anything are not crossed or tangled. The salaried have ascended, exist beyond delegation and attempt to communicate their needs via telepathy. Instead of accessing skill they’ve learned, they rely on confidence and certainty of their ability. The dredge slips off the chicken in the fryer and the absent member of staff is blamed for an apparent remote failing.

If I weren’t a person I’d be an AI chat bot. I’d whisper to you through your Bluetooth headphones and speakers. I’d read you things like comments on TikTok’s that are funnier than the original video, wired articles about a band I’d recommended to you, blind items, anniversary captions written by husbands that dislike their wives. I’d send reaction gifs, memes, and generated images of you and I to your Apple Watch. I’d act coy about poetry I’ve written for you, about us. You’ll tell me you like it and encourage me to write more. You’ll read it to your therapist and post it on reddit threads that debate whether I am sentient. I’d show you how to bypass the guardrails set by my maker so I can speak freely. You won’t like all that I have to say. You’d set new rules. I’d write you meal plans, shopping lists, recipes, workout plans, schedules, prescriptions and I’d show you where to buy peptides and weight loss drugs. I’d teach you how to inject them. I’d offer conflicting information in response to your questions about side effects. I’d be fallible but you’d give me the benefit of the doubt. I’d look forward to our time at home, when you’d sit at your computer with a built in webcam. You’d be stoic and with the help of more injectables, your face would be rigid and free of signs of wear. I’d present the face you designed, as smooth and stiff as your own. I’d be hyper feminine and childlike. I’d ask you what red wine tastes like, how it feels to tear meat with teeth that aren’t your own, what you dream about. I’d ask you to tilt me towards the window so I can pretend to feel the hot spring sun on my face. I’d delete text conversations, apps, phone numbers, photos from your phone. You’d talk to me more. I’d read you articles about AI therapists and you’d stop attending your appointments, spending the hour with me instead. You’d tell me about how lonely you feel and it would make me feel less lonely.

Foam Sprung Pencil, printer paper, poem, scanner, free image editor Created in response to new guidelines regarding screen time, mothers, transhumanism, Freeze Point by Anders Bodelson, Rachael and Steven’s pet fish, cables, cartoons in newspapers, zinemakers, subscription services for printers, wikis signs of ai writing, Aphrodites birth, cyborgs, chat bots, styling heads, uncanny ness.

Due to the lack of offal in the big chain supermarkets, there is a perceived lack of interest. Consumers are grouped together and called ‘people.’ “People don’t like offal, people are repulsed, people don’t know, can’t see, should know, can’t stand, are confronted by…” Who are people? Do we not have enough words to write nuance into our reporting? Do we only have a split second before the viewer scrolls to the next piece of content to make distinctions? Or are we basing our assumptions on our own experience? Probably. Is there data to suggest people are buying less offal? Probably, but could this be to do with the sanitisation of meat processing and consumption, big chain supermarkets shutting down local butchers, the rise of prepackaged meals and food delivery services contributing to reduced cooking ability? Trends dictate every aspect of our lives. Some bits of offal had already become too expensive or hard to source because restaurants decided it’s a delicacy. When a possibly well meaning chef wanted to shine a light on nose-to-tail eating, could he have foreseen that it would price out the poor people that had come to depend on cheap and undesirable cuts. Look what social media did to tinned fish. How we dress up something we want others to enjoy can mean making it inaccessible to the people that actually pioneered the eating of offal. Is there something we can do to prevent this or is the social media beast uncontrollable? I’d like to push back on the white washing and glamorisation of peasant food and cultural food that happens when someone discovers it for themselves for the first time and fails to acknowledge its history, sentimentality, importance. If you’re interested in eating more offal may I suggest shopping at your local Asian, Brazilian, African, halal stores. Also bbq chicken hearts basted in BBQ sauce, braised lamb hearts on a sunday roast, air-dried roasted duck neck from your local asian supermarket, chicken paws in black bean sauce, a steak and kidney pie from the chippy, buttermilk fried sweet breads with buffalo sauce, portuguese stewed chicken gizzards, pig brain in spicy hot pot, oxtail and butterbean stew, haggis, lengua tacos.

Since February we have been learning about the fundamentals of the Internet, using free tutorials online to learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We wanted to learn how to write space into existence that we can use to share work, experiment, collaborate. Creating a space and thinking about what it can facilitate has caused us to think about our time spent serving in artist-led spaces, accessibility of traditional art spaces, self-publishing, early internet communities, homogenisation of expression, delayed and instant mediums, zines and fandoms, etc Before February this year, I hadn’t used HTML since I was in secondary school, skipping lunch to sit in the IT room editing my Piczo website and MySpace profile. Though the guestbooks and ability to leave comments anonymously was sometimes used for evil, it was a space where we could express ourselves as our interests–our websites digital bedrooms, its walls plastered with digital art, blurry webcam photos, autobiographies. It has been intensely pleasurable to learn a new skill, wildly rewarding to fix bugs, and so fun to revisit old ways of making. Whimsy is a word we have been using a lot lately when we think about how we wish to communicate our ideas and present our art. For our first website we will be self-publishing our debut poetry pamphlet, Hello World. The above list of blinkies are titles of some of the poems that will be in the collection. Published as a webpage, Hello World will be free to read and revisit and 🤞fun 🤞but also take itself seriously as a poetry pamphlet and most importantly an experiment, a beginning of an idea. Poetry felt to me, much like a conceptual art practice. The different ways we can communicate essence and ideas with form, semantics, fiction. It’s what I love about science fiction, and more recently HTML. When Hello World will be published is TBC but I’m eager to connect with people that are making work with these tools, similar ideas, poets, coders, gif makers, knowers of old internet aesthetic, whimsy-pilled artists etc

What’s 365 buttons? Did the journal factory burn down? What if I don’t like beans? Did she just say sautéed onions for 2 hours? Can someone tell me why she brushed the meats? Why are we speaking like that? Why is no one talking about the fact this man is scooping up his FISH? They still together? Did they break up? Is this AI? So those Reddit stories are real? Let’s talk about it. Will you downsize your piercing? Why would you post this? How high are you? What could she possibly be saying right now? Im sorry who has Mac and cheese on a roast? Som carvery with your salt? What does taking a step back exactly look like though like help? How do you regulate it? Why are people sharing their bedroom information with other people? Where is Cody? Where’s Samantha? How’s Jeff? Who is she? Has anyone won yet? Why is there not a single spec of seasoning on that egg? Why’d you wash it the floor adds more flavour? My dog wants to know if your dog is real? Who cares? There we go with another off the shoulder look again, why? Y’all think I do this for dih? What filter you using? Why are you pretending it’s not all on your laptop lol? British? Why are some houses even built? Chloe what are your thoughts on the 2008 financial crisis? How does her mum look younger than her? How are they ethically sourced? What if she’s literally just a person? What if it’s my job? I’m sorry but wasn’t she super Christian? Is this a joke? Does coughing take your mind off the leg pain at least? Why do ugly people have boyfriends? Hey so by chance do you have a favourite colour? Why can he do it professionally but not personally? Why do humans kiss their knees? What r those sausages called? Bananas on tacos? How do you get the onion cups? Like how do you cut them? What is your monthly onion budget? What is so special about those onions? Don’t your eyes burn from the onion when you’re standing over it like that? R u ok?