March on my computer

Hi there!

This month’s wrap-up is shorter (and tardy). My phone was robbed and I lost my first draft with it :/ Now I’ve learnt the hard way that maybe I should stop refraining from backing up my stuff on the cloud… Here’s some bits and pieces I could salvage from my March.

This is not a dream! Six Sex, one of my favorite pop artists at the moment, finally released her new EP X-sex and I got to witness its live debut at Complejo C Art Media. This was my first time attending a concert of hers. It was everything I’d dreamed of and more! Six Sex’s stage presence is terribly hot and magnetic. It’s hard for me to explain it, but I adore how she carries her hypersexual persona in such an unapologetic way that is anything but exploitative. I can’t put into words how vibrant the atmosphere was at the gig. It was loud, sweaty, euphoric. Every single person in that venue was enjoying themselves to the fullest, without feeling unsafe or out of place for even a minute. To be able to create that sort of environment for a community is something very special.

As for the EP, it’s an impeccable club pastiche that knows when to draw from the strengths of her previous EP, Satisfire, and when to dabble in more experimental territory. It can give you a catchy squat routine straight from The Substance but also a hypnotic bad trip pierced by a Yoko Ono-esque moan. The record is rich in its variety without sounding all over the place, managing to move past the dizzying success of “4 noviosS” to a more grounded musical identity in this rave era. This, to me, is X-sex’s major feat: the cementing of Six Sex’s status as an underground superstar.

While I wait for Six Sex to come back soon to the city, I’ll be rewatching this amazing film of the show¹ made by ezesad and makabroon. ezesad’s channel is more than worth checking out: it’s a vast visual archive of gigs from the independent music scene in Buenos Aires. Obviously, my favorite project of them by a long shot is the recording of Dillom’s Por cesárea Tour at Luna Park.

The work of Lean Vazquez, Six Sex’s creative director, deserves a post of its own. Imagine how thrilled I was to find out that he’s also worked for Fiah Miau (who recently released her first album, PUSSY IN BOOTS!) and Juana Rozas, two of my top personal discoveries of 2024. The latter just shared the last single from her upcoming album: “BAD CHOICE” is a sickeningly bouncy glimpse into the life of Tanya, the fictional protagonist of the record. Another new music video I loved was FKA twigs’s “Childlike Things”, featuring North West, Kevin Smith and Jake Shane in a grim extravaganza that portrays the eternal clash between artists and labels.

This theme is also tackled from a more humorous angle in another personal favorite of the month, PAPOTA by CA7RIEL & Paco Amoroso. The Argentinian duo finally released on streaming platforms their widely acclaimed live session at NPR Music’s Tiny Desk, and took advantage of their virality doing what they know best: taking absurdity to its limits. Apart from the live tracks, the album includes four brand new songs that were presented in a campy short film (directed by Martín Piroyansky) where the boys play the rise and fall of their gigachad alteregos as they navigate their newfound international success.

Through its flashy visuals and tongue-in-cheek lyricism, PAPOTA (Argentinian slang for anabolic steroids) touches upon hypermasculinity and toxic self-improvement rhetoric that is becoming louder and louder in online spaces. Such is the current prevalence of these themes that the new Netflix mini-series Adolescence, with only four episodes, has received tremendous amounts of attention. Young newcomer Owen Cooper, who was only 14 years old at the time of filming, delivers an astounding performance as Jamie Miller, a schoolboy deep in manosphere-adjacent ideas who is accused of murdering a female classmate. Such a brief synopsis doesn’t bring justice to the brilliance of the series, which steers away from the stereotypical did-he-or-didn’t-he story to explore Jamie’s inner and outer world. Finding out that Cooper will play young Heathcliff (!!!) in the upcoming adaptation of Wuthering Heights got me excited that maybe there’s still some hope for that film. Fingers crossed!

Speaking of talented actors, I’m still thinking about Mikey Madison’s loopy handwriting and her gorgeous look at the Oscars. I have to admit I was really excited that she won the Oscar… until I finally got to watch Ainda Estou Aqui after the ceremony. A wonderful film that is extremely sensible in its storytelling and treatment of real-life figures. I’m not very familiar with Brazilian cinema, but Fernanda Torres’s poignant performance is one I will not forget for a long time.

At the heart of this anti-legacy legacy is the unknown, new things happening so fast that we don’t totally understand them. “It’s called the internet,” announced The Network Issue in 1994. “From computer nerds to info-junkies, chat addicts to cultish weirdos, some 40 million people are now ‘on-line.’ Is this the future of communication?” (from Thom Bettridge's The Unknown Issue: Editor’s Letter)

Legacy is Thom Bettridge’s central interest in his first issue breathing life into i-D’s identity as the magazine’s new editor-in-chief. The publication’s return to print had me spending plenty of time these past weeks reading its articles and marvelling at its photos. Some highlights: Introducing Enza Khoury, Ask Naomi Anything, The Internet’s Faceless Tastemakers – Unmasked, Meet the Brainrot Royalty of Internet Rap, and Part-Time Models, Full-Time Skaters.

My newest rabbit hole topic is niche visual archives. Last month I shared Khajistan’s digital archive, which is an insanely huge collection of images sourced from Islamic corners of the web. Random Imgur Image Generator, while not a proper archive per se due to its ephemeral nature, is the closest you can get to visualizing a net-induced stream of consciousness. Damon Albarn Unofficial Archive, the print-focused branch of the British musician’s most thorough fan hub, holds dozens of interviews and magazine photoshoots. Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology is a must for anyone interested in the Internet as a creative medium in itself. Blair Johnson and Luke Williams’s Rock Collections features many digital collections of all themes and formats. My work “Memética Argenta” is showcased there! It was super fun to build. I really want to keep toying with “artisanal” generative art (if uni doesn’t consume me this term…)

Before I go, some other ideas I’ve been thinking about obsessively:

• Chappell Roan looking gorgeous in Valentino at Paris Fashion Week
• WTTDOTM's “Mr. Beast Saying Increasingly Large Amounts of Money”
• “AI-powered automated surveillance” is already happening in factories, unfortunately :/
• How DeepSeek became a fortune teller for China’s youth
• Guillermo Kuitca’s Del 1 al 30000. Nunca más.

Take care and see you next month :)

P.S. I got three midterms on the first week of May, so there’s not a chance that the next edition of On My Computer will be here on time. Whew, I had to get that out of my chest.