On Emily Mulenga: Now that we know the world is ending soon… what are you gonna wear?
Excerpts from an interview by Luz Hitters
June 2020
As our connection with the world becomes increasingly mediated by screens, our confinement faces us with existentialist questions. We might find ourselves trying to define our identity through the internet. Over these past months, our lives have been challenged by an unprecedented threat that has put into perspective our prior sensations of false safety.
In these confusing times, Emily Mulenga’s work gains further relevance to understanding our part in what many call the ‘new normal,’ or what I would personally describe as a response to the inundation of external stimuli we have faced. Through the use of avatars and surrealist environments, the British artist (b. 1991, Burton-on-Trent) explores the role of the internet in self-expression and its contribution to us defying political systems.
Mulenga uses black female cyborgs and a pink bunny as the main characters in her videos. Inspired both by cyberpunk and city pop cultures, she creates spaces of alienation caused by high tech and hyper-consumerism. Mulenga personalises the same characters she creates by blurring the line between reality and fantasy. She portrays clubs, busy streets and the classical London underground, where the concept of hyper-reality precludes viewers from differentiation materiality from simulation.[1] In Mulenga’s work, this re-creation of our world seems atemporal, as the nostalgic vapourwave aesthetics are weaved into contemporary situations and apocalyptic scenarios that we see as speculative. By doing so, her art recalls the unconscious, as past, present and future become merged.
Her scenes are charged with sardonicism, as she ridicules an oddly familiar hyper-accelerated culture. She makes use of fetishes to expose the superficiality of societal values. This opens an internal debate on whether we have given in to our zombie-like behaviors. Ironically, viewers can identify better with non-human characters. The avatars perform actions that expose our death drive and evasiveness as ways to cope with existentialism: a desire to both save and destroy ourselves.[2] As such, viewers begin to realise the loneliness embedded in technology that is spun out of frenzied capitalism.
Her video Now that we know the world is ending soon… what are you gonna wear? (2019) explores the alienation inherent to our superficial culture. Guided by a pink bunny, a less-innocent version of the cartoons of our childhood, we are transported into a relatable video-game set in a world of excess and surveillance. The bunny’s main concern seems to be oversharing her life on social media, in spite of an automated announcement of the beginning of the apocalypse. Instead of worrying, a more piercing question fills her mind: what is she going to wear for the occasion? Mulenga’s work portrays life as a ridiculous performance, where we conform to the stereotypes that have been perpetually fed to us through technology and consumerism. Her scenes show an inversion of supposed spirituality, where instead of connecting with ourselves and our surroundings we are actively avoiding reflection and introspection. Consequently, she shows how the same tech that is supposed to bind us together ends up widening our differences and disconnecting us from one another.
Avatars are a useful medium to understanding our relationship with both the digital and physical worlds. Her exposure of automated actions denounce our submissiveness to the control mechanisms embedded on social media platforms. Social media could be argued to act as a contemporary extension of the Panopticon.[3] We are portrayed to be imprisoned behind a screen. The screen constantly surveils our online actions, desensitises us via a continual stimulus, and forces us into automated consumption. They specifically detach us from our true essence, planting a fear of loneliness and making us oblivious to who we actually are. Mulenga highlights this controlled world that may seem comforting, but that will generate a feeling of dysphoria in the long run.
When asked about digital art’s role in creating a socio-political drift, Mulenga provides an unconventional answer:
“I think that the most relevant form of art nowadays is memes: so silly and so political as well. It is digestible, easy to grasp, easily shareable, easily disseminated: a direct way to get information to many people. Almost anybody can create them fairly quickly, and it doesn’t have to be highly polished: that’s accepted and even expected. They are a running commentary of contemporary events.”
Personally, memes are a double-edged sword, acting as a tool for comic relief, and a way to promote hidden agendas. They can be accessible and democratising, yet also implemented to perpetuate certain political discourses. They act as an anthropological footprint: a way of immortalising history through portraying people’s reactions to particular events. Digital responses can have a significant impact on our collective actions and self-discovery. This allows us to begin amalgamating an integrated concept of who we are, inseparable from the external gaze of one another.
“I began using avatars when I became interested in the blurring between the online and offline worlds. Our online presence becomes a reflection of who we are offline and whether they can be separated at all. I imagined myself within virtual worlds, and I imagined my twin avatar within the tangible world, switching places. The first avatar I made was a kind of self-portrait, an intangible digital version of myself: to see in what way I could explore the digital world.”
As her practise progresses, her characters are not explicitly tied to self-discovery but become a means to challenge the status quo. They are vehicles for conscious criticism and the exploration of repressed desires. These characters allow for absurdity and counterfactual scenes, mirroring an outsider’s morbid curiosity into very distant lives.
The digital world’s appeal lays in the nullification of societal and physical rules, providing a territory where the darkest aspects of personalities can thrive. It claims to be a place void of ethics and regulations, an area where the most aspects of our personalities can flourish. The screen promises a certain degree of protection, an innocuous interaction, and a clear division of fantasy from reality. However, through her art, Emily Mulenga confronts us with the deceitful and manipulative aspect of these affirmations. Her art seems to be subverting the escapism that we are addicted to, facing us with the complexity of our evasiveness. Through the digital format, viewers are paradoxically fed into a loop of passive consumerism and active surveillance, just like the characters in our screens. As such, waking up from this automation becomes not only a choice but an ongoing challenge.
[1] Eco, Umberto, Travels in Hyperreality, Mariner Books (1973).
[2] Freud, Sigmund, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, The International Psycho-Analytical Library No. 4 (1920).
[3] Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, New York: Random House (1977).