Dear Readers,
This week’s Tokens of Affection features the work of Violeta López— who sometimes has also released work under the name Violet Forest. Many of López’s pieces are looping videos and other media that require movement. Substack only allows me to embed still images. Therefore, it is essential for the experience of the artist’s intent that you click through the links included in the text to see the pieces the way they were intended. They’re really cool—you won’t regret it.
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Violeta López was selling cookies on the DarkWeb when most people were still using Bitcoin to buy stolen credit card numbers. Her Dark Web Bakesale, a collaborative work as Violet Forest with Gabriela Hillerman and May Waver, was part of an ongoing feminist aesthetic project called cybertwee*. The Cybertwee Manifesto, produced by the group alongside its eponymous tumblr ,embraces the high femme, pink, lacy, but also uncanny and biological aspects of a sister aesthetic to cyberpunk. In the tradition of Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (1985), and Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminist Manifesto (2013), and predating the Xenofeminist Manifesto (2018), the Cybertwee Manifesto (2014) was a net-art inflection point well before any mainstream blockchain art even existed.
López was hacking retro hardware into Barbie house shells at the forefront of the digital art revolution, and her NFT work continues to push the boundaries of the medium. Her professional work in AR/VR lends her “Porcelain Being” – part of a series of imagined “machinelearning gan fantasy” entities on H=N* — a deft familiarity with the human form. The disembodied crystalline portraiture bust with bursts of algal blooms in stereotypically ‘feminine’ colorways and embodies the hard/soft dialectic at the root of much of López’s imagery. Her series of cybertwee hybrid organic-Y2K nostalgic computer devices nudges itself into the uncanny, resisting the stereotypical deployment of retrofuture nostalgia that seems to plague many NFT artists.
López has released a statement saying she will not contribute to the redeployment of H=N in a new form since it has largely become part of the web3/crypto infrastructure of the Global North, rather than the tool to empower Global South creators and artists it was originally intended to be. This is in keeping with the politics of her pieces that might at first appear to be adjacent to the hazy girlculture aesthetic of photographer Petra Collins, but are in reality much more deeply engaged with issues of bodies and power. Consider “Silk ‧͙⁺˚ ⁺ Satin ‧͙⁺˚ ⁺ Flowers ‧͙⁺˚ ⁺ Melted Wax” (the special characters in the title are one of López’s signature uses of disarming cuteness). This piece*** runs in a constant morphing loop, signalling its discomforting lifelikeness even as its fuchsia and florals, and ruffled sides, somehow also suggest, in keeping with the piece’s name, frilly lingerie. It’s twee but it’s also somehow ominous, empowered by its ultrafemme biological resonances to threaten even as it twinkles.
A still from “strawberry ༝﹡˖˟ rosebuds” shows how the piece inflates like a pair of deformed lungs dotted with jelly candies. Its boundaries glow and pulse into a perceived ectoplasm, some sort of mega-cellular berry bedroom drape menace. It’s not alive, exactly, but it’s not dead either; much like the y2K culture that López plays off of as referent. In fact, her NFTs are amongst the few I can immediately picture being collected or displayed in a physical context immediately upon viewing them. They belong in translucent glitter-shelled Tamagotchi cases, 2007 iMacs, and inside Polly Pockets and I hope to see gallerists, museums, and collectors commissioning bespoke work like this from López in what would be a much-deserved major show. Violeta López’s NFT pieces are fascinating and eminently collectable without renouncing their complex and still-emerging contentions about the gendered/embodied self online, and in physical space. They dribble pink slime on your preconceptions of the medium in the best possible way.
* The “twee”—as suffix or full word-- was widely used online in the 2010’s to refer to the sweet, affective, emotional, or somehow cute, often but not always associated with women, femmes, and nonbinary aesthetic concerns.
**Artist-beloved and now deceased Tezos platform Hic Et Nunc.
*** The artist’s most recent work is buyable/viewable mostly on Foundation.