[Olivia Kan-Sperling]
Text 5653/Image 9
234876—23 NYC
INVISIBLE INK
One of my earliest memories of digital technology is from when my pre-school classroom’s Smartboard™ display needed calibrating. The screen had to be pressed at a sequence of different points marked with + symbols, using a grey stylus resembling a whiteboard marker with its cap on, until the entire board had been treated, concentrated pressure applied along its meridians like some acupunctural massage. The insistent tactility of this process counteracted the impression of writing something without leaving a trace, calibrating something in my own mind about the technologies that would very soon become smoother, more virtual, less liable to spilling their interfaces beyond the curving edges of their touchscreens.
This platonic ideal of a digital dimension overlapping seamlessly with the physical world, like some liquid-crystal infinity pool, quickly found its expression in this rapid release of sleeker devices with keener haptics that rendered each previous update as clunky and outmoded as the Smartboard™ felt even back when I first used it. At the same time, all the old software, 144pp videos and snowy websites I used to browse at that age remained where they were, buffering beneath this glossy surface, like lo-fi corals beneath the convex meniscus of the present.
The experience of growing up perpetually online is defined by this twinning of sharpness with fuzziness, analogue with digital memory, the screenshot flash of moments both vanished and preserved forever. A temporal slipperiness, riddled further by the impression that it all happened within the space of one continuous screen— a mirror or glowing portal where everything I have ever typed, all the chats and images and fitful attempts at constructing a public identity, lies there just beneath the same surface I am currently looking at as I type this.
This hallucinatory quality is inherent to all media, and yet is intensified by the way digital technology has gradually encoded its analogue counterparts into itself, where almost any cultural form might now be simulated by the same inputs and display— from literature, films and video-games, to diaries, instruments and even relationships— a sublimation defined not only by the absence of a physical referent, but the way these forms have become porous with one another as a result, mere tabs apart and alive to the same keystrokes, ghosting the same galaxy of pixels.
Skeuomorphic software icons, such as pens, cameras and envelopes, just about preserve the line that has all but dissolved in this progression, the one that distinguishes mediation from magic, metaphor from machine. Where parallel to this evaporation of physical reality into ever-more virtual apparitions, is the imbuing of once-immaterial forms with a ghostly substance, as words become objects and abstractions take on clickable shapes, alive with new symbolic and material relationships to the world.
The image I always encounter while trying to picture this coalescence is that of floating liquid shards, simultaneously melting and hardening into the multi-faceted yet single-sided crystal ball of the screen. Where lying behind this figment is a textural experience of our very reality’s fabric that a generation of Proustian Zoomers is sensitive to, waiting for the perfectly tuned frieze of pixels that will take them back to a time when the internet was something you could almost touch.
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These are the geometric curves and polished distortions that laminate the prose of OLIVIA KAN-SPERLING, a writer whose *pen* effortlessly unfolds the mirror’s-edge between virtual and material worlds, a pleated line that she configures above all at the level of text and symbolism itself. This translates into a digital modernism of sorts, an experimental but crystalline style that sparkles like an 8-bit diamond, and which is the utterly unique achievement of her debut novella, something that reads like a script hidden in the vanishing point of some faraway loading screen.
Upon first glance, ISLAND TIME resembles a work of fan fiction, one ‘starring’ Kendall Jenner and Lil Peep, a billing that already syncopates what is typically the overt fantasy of this form. Because, although Kendall is our protagonist, a famous model waking into the perfect dimensions of her suite life, it is uncannily clear that everything is not as it seems. Any biographical similarities to the ‘real’ Kardashian scion are filtered through this transparency, where the Kendall we are introduced to in Island Time is truly the one we all know, which is to say, a verified figment; a constellation of pixels, likes and followers; a beach body composed across Instagram alcoves that frame her life as one endless summer, occasionally telescoped by a Vogue cover or apartment tour courtesy of Architectural Digest. Island Time’s Kendall is serenely aware of this public image, and yet, like us, appears to be on the outside of her identity, looking in. Her status as a professional model limns this confused state with a zen clarity in which she contemplates herself as a blank slate, a vessel for our projections of an idealised beauty. Be like water, Kenny. The effect is glaringly subtle, ensuring that every reader pictures the same face in their mind, and yet retains only a silhouette.
This is the first of many inversions through which Island Time is faceted, an ambient reflectivity rippling with an internet as elemental as the air. Kan-Sperling started writing it when she was a student in Providence, during the spatiotemporal limbo of COVID lockdown. As a result, Island Time’s titular psychogeography is a mind-map of disjointed portals that collapse digital and physical space into the same window-dressing. Socially-isolated walks blur the texture of a deserted urban fabric with the crowded emptiness of the internet, echoing the soulless vistas of the Metaverse and drab architecture of its corporate overlords, an omnipresent veneer that is enough to make even a dive like THE WICKED WHALER’S BAR feel like a Starbucks. Of course this is all shot through with the paradisal beauty of scrolling your favourite influencer’s Instagram page, translating into Island Time’s oceanfront setting and endless horizon of sparkling nowhere. Meanwhile the novella’s essentially plotless form is stirred by repetition, with days blurring into one another and a series of flashbacks gesturing to a mystery surrounding the disappearance of Kendall’s ex, Lil Peep.
Kendall entertains the occasional question mark regarding the reality of her existence in this affective bubble, as she navigates its various thresholds, collects decorative objects and occasionally encounters other, equally embalmed celebrity interlocutors. Meanwhile her thoughts and actions are performed with a hyperawareness that mirrors her eternal state of being perceived, a fragmented POV that is varnished by dissociation, any cracks resolving into soft, kaleidoscopic rays as the very words that convey her through and constitute this world themselves become imbued with an etherial, interactive sheen. For instance, a word like ‘sparkle’ might manifest as an Instagram-filter effect, ✨ emoji or literal constellation of shimmering molecules, each version flickering like the same element at multiple states of matter at once. In this way, the flatness of her environment takes on a kind of dropped-shadow depth, as if replacing 3-dimensionality with a strobing of surfaces that diffuse metaphors and objects, pixels and particles, into the same synthetic light.
Kendall breezes through this constant flow of special effects with a musing that is, like, Pynchonian in its beach-stoner vernacular, only updated for the 21st century via the Xanax-hued tones of a digital It Girl— the emotional equivalent of how using multiple exclamation points!!! feels neither ironic nor entirely felt. The result is a highly modulated online affect soaked in the ghostly ellipses of how we use text to ‘speak’ online. A disembodied voice that is at the centre of Island Time’s uncanny physics, ultimately reflecting the way that Kendall’s thoughts, words, actions and even her surroundings all share the same material substrate: words— words that have been completely overwritten by digital technology.
This meta-dimensional quality is inflected by the way Island Time is overlaid with different media forms, most recognisably the world-building mechanisms of online text-based RPGS, where the line between words that constitute an environment and those that navigate it is distinguished by how objects are introduced in all-caps, such as HANDBAG, MIRROR & WHITE T-SHIRT— in another tonal device that flickers with subdued mania. Meanwhile daydreams and lighting changes and Lil Peep tracks fold the text into new mirage-like textures, blurring lyrical scenery with virtual effects and weather formations into a single vaporwave subjectivity. Kan-Sperling sustains these highly stylised sequences using cinematic camera-cue descriptions to weave imagery and narrative with all the aesthetic intensity of a music video, but which perhaps even more resemble the digital fan-cam— online pop-culture edits that mix clips, filters and song snippets into highly emotive collages often full of yearning and melancholy, some of the most painfully beautiful ephemera of online life.
The question of how to express these multimedia experiences of our digital existences through the medium of writing has typically been answered by the niche genre of Hyperlink Fiction, which can literally host these effects and transitions along with the interactivity of a choose-your-own-adventure format. Where the main problem with this genre is how it paradoxically narrows and waters down the open-ended internet that it simulates. In contrast, Island Time is haunted by these different media forms and possibilities, which are felt all the more for their absence, above all in how the branching pathways of its digital RPG veneer are expressed as more of a style rather than an actual overriding mechanic.
The only recent work that bears comparison might be AGGR0 DR1FT, Harmony Korine’s brute-forced look at the future of cinema in the era of AI and brain-rot, in which a psychotropic Miami burns under infrared lenses and characters deliver lines with the flatness of video-game NPCS, while a tortured narration murmurs assassin clichés like rap ad-lips, in a molten cutscene by turns numbing and hypnotic. No matter how you might feel about that director’s provocations, the deftness of Island Time’s media collage is refreshingly slick and carefree in comparison, like a deck of cards in a magic trick in the way it offers the reader the illusion of choice while shuffling the same symbols into dazzling new arrangements, translating the runic building blocks of digital media into an object as user-friendly and slyly profound as a magic-8 ball. Except perhaps an oval one, designed by Apple, and then cracked across a turquoise screensaver.
This overriding quality of Kan-Sperling’s glyphic prose— how it invites endless comparisons to the virtual objects it describes or the way it feels stylistically like Hypertext, underlined with a cerulean clickability— is prismatic with the way that words typed on a screen possess a different materiality, and perhaps even meaning, compared with those written on paper. A transparent but elusive gravitational shift, one that both hovers behind every sentence in the luminescence of the screen, and boils right down to the DNA of individual letters arranged next to other letters, where a misspelled word on your computer might spirit you to somewhere entirely random corner of the web. This is not to mention the ghost of predictive text, freighting every word sequence with the machine’s watchful, pattern-recognising eye, as well as the even more invisible wing-beats of computer code fluttering beneath the surface of it all.
On the one hand, Kan-Sperling’s writing achieves its effects by being alive to this febrility of the digital metaphor, where any description might be literalised by its digital embodiment or icon, infused with an extra-dimensional lustre that she conjures across a mood-board of virtual accessories that compact this distinction between fake and real, material and abstract, in a procession of filters, fragrances and floating coins.
And yet these digital physics, the way they strip images of their metaphoric properties by suspending them in a medium where the symbol is equal to what it symbolises, also represent a possible narrowing of the inherent multiplicity of language, how a single word or image on its own can mean multiple things and is interactive with this potential even before being tagged to strict digital properties. The way Kan-Sperling responds to this flattening is tantamount to the replacement of hand-weaving by the mechanical loom. Her sentences unfurl like folds of fabric, doubling back upon the same motifs, treating her imagery like shapes and patterns that accumulate and cascade with re-applied meanings that crest this newly superficial and yet material dimension of the technology of writing, in a flickering, machinic programming of language.
It is this dazzling fusion of style with the literal substance of her medium that makes her, in my opinion, one of the most exceptional writers of our online generation— across fictional works such as Island Time and stellar contributions to the vanguard prose of Heavy Traffic Magazine, and extending to a constellation of essays in journals such as N+1 and Spike Art that investigate these emergent properties of digital fashion and fiction. The Kardashians are frequent muses, as are Instagram carousels and the fractal shapes found in galaxies and crystals. Kan-Sperling can also be encountered in mud fights with other models, as at Elena Velez’s YR004 collection show; flitting across the media theory podcast circuit; or else playing with the limits of form via her Instagram posts, an oeuvre crafted under the handle of @dianadiagram, a name that I always find myself mistaking for her own.
This confusion is teased out in a conversation we had earlier this year, in the way Kan-Sperling responds to questions with a polyphony of different voices as she filters and modifies her reflections through the hall-of-mirrors that surrounds having a binary opinion about something in the digital era. This results in multiple tracks of often contrasting thoughts, as if speaking as Diana one moment, and then the ‘Olivia’ whose preferences are mediated by algorithms and recommendation filters the next. It’s a sort of duet with herself, ventriloquising her own predictive text, saying multiple things at once, winking at the Olivia Kan-Sperling GPT model whose mimicry she has already folded into her own programming, along with the source-texts of Thomas Pynchon novels, Mad Men, Prada ad copy, and the entirety of Kendall Jenner’s Instagram feed.
We spoke with Olivia/Diana about some of these things. It’s up to you to decide who said what.
This article may be written from a fan's point of view, rather than a neutral point of view. Please clean it up to conform to a higher standard of quality, and to make it neutral in tone
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TWIST: Island Time is awash with the glitch and shimmer of digital mediation, whether as a general stylised affect or via embedded motifs within the narrative such as floating coins and a pulsing mini-map. What is your relationship with video games as hallmarks of digital media in particular?
OLIVIA KS: I always really liked video games on a conceptual level. I studied media theory and always wanted to be into them but the short answer is no. I mean, fundamentally they’re literally for children. They’re so boring. It seems like as a form, on paper they should be the most amazing immersive five-dimensional experience— and we’re getting there. But I mostly like those very boomed-out vaporwave aestehtics or early 3D renders.
> I did play them as a kid. In particular a lot of open-ended, text-based role-playing games. You would be in an online forum or something and would type prompts like *walks over* or *talks to*. So that was where that side of the book came from. I was pretty nerdy at that time.
> Arguably you could say like, Instagram is a video game.
TWIST: I rememeber being so embarrased by watching anime. But now that aesthetic has been so mass-adopted. Everyone has their anime-girl profile pictures.
OLIVIA KS: There is somehting remarkable about the way that the aesthetics we’re obsessed with are so often, increasingly, from childhood. We’ve seen a babyfication of subculture (maybe the inverse of the infantile/retarded content of mainstream culture, The New Yorker, A24 etc). I guess this has been evident in art for a while at this point. It’s only happening in literature now— like, the past couple of years, and not yet in mainstream fiction.
TWIST: In what ways do you connect this granular attentiveness to style and aesthetics that imbues your writing to the subject of capital-F Fashion?
OLIVIA KS: I mean there’s the fashion industry and then there’s how people dress and I don’t really have anything intelligent to say on either.
> It is material that interests me, especially on the level of cultural criticism. Like it’s the most irrelevant form or habit— the way people are dressing has never meant less than it does now. If it ever did that much. We’ve reached a point in history and in discursive evolution and cultural awareness that every single person is aware of trends— they go in and out! Even the most normie person knows that they’re going to be buying skinny jeans agains soon. And so if you’re that conscious of trends—
> Not that I don’t love to participate in trends. I can’t stop buying clothes.
> But as an intellectual thing it’s like, we get it. We get how trends work and it’s just not that complicated: they are seasonal.
> I guess the reason I like looking at runway shows, other than that I just like clothes, is that there’s something both embodied and abstract about fashion as a medium. In a runway show, you’re watching someone create this articulation of a ‘walk’, this very basic element of human behaviour, and aestheticise it. Theatre and cinema are so conservative, even in their alternative and indie versions; they’re so stuck on narrative, on character, on pretense. Fashion is real. It makes money. We wear clothes on our bodies. You can’t fake-buy an outfit. An interesting fashion show intervenes much more radically in the fabric of our daily lives.
TWIST: One thing that comes across to me in your writing is this effect or quality of words as accessories, as almost-objects. Where that division between fashion as something both abstract and material is bridged by language, in how the description of fabrics, processes and gestures provide a sort of tactile quality or laminate between a garment and its image, which as a result produces the aura of ‘fashion’. Something increasingly literalised by digital technology and the reverse-engineering of clothes via semantic network analysis and trends metadata.
OLIVIA KS: Yes. Like how Prada’s ad copy is like an Art World press release— International Art English. A word salad or pattern where the text becomes a texture that is applied to the clothes. It’s dense in this way where the meaning is kind of there but it’s more about the sound of these words together. Although it’s functionally illegible at some level, it becomes somehting else, and hwo do you describe that? People want you to make fun of it, like ‘Oh, Prada’s using this Derridian, Baudrillardian language to sell clothes’. Yes, you can critique luxury consumption, but it’s a lot more interesting to ask: waht is the relationship between abstraction and that which we wear on our bodies? What is the relationship between theory and fashion?
TWIST: This is especially interesting given how the Fashion world has positioned itself as a platform and source of funding for cultural theory.
OLIVIA KS: Theory is totally dead right now. It’s just not comparable to the sixties and seventies, or even the nineties. But maybe it’s because we all just understand semiotics intuiviely now. Everyone gets McLuhan and the basic ideas of early media theory. Everyone understands that the medium is the message because of their own experience of media, becaue we’re seeing so many types of media form so quickly that everyone can understand how the platform decisions are shaping the types of images you can make and, even more viscerally, the types of social interactions you can have. It’s like an old meme— those brain exploding pictures. I think there is something in the mode of reading and analysis that’s much mroe available to people. I think about Mad Men. Everyone in America watched Mad Men, and if you’re having an entire generation of consumers grow up watching a show about stuff being sold to them, they will have a different relationship to advertisments. Though maybe not one that will make them immune to ads... Don Draper only made me love ads even more. Which just shows that understanding something doesn’t matter at all. Understanding is just for fun. Theory is just for fun. Like fashion.
TWIST: You once described ISLAND TIME as an impvoerished rip-off or fan-fiction of The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. When it comes to writing against the backdrop of a post-internet state of flatness, in which irony and authenticity are fused; the contemporary and the retro sit side by side; and most cultural references are dissociated from their soure, this approach to your material feels especially canny as it relates to the inescapability of these cultural, existential, even material shifts as they surround the act of writing today. I was wondering especially about your embrace of genre tropes and use of cliché. To me these seem like ways of gathering together the codes and predictive texts of past and present and re-presening them. In brief, making cliché new again. When does your particular approach to genre come from?
OLIVIA KS: I feel like I would answer this question differently in different moments.
> I do just really like genre fiction or popular media. Things that are popular have power, and not because they are more ‘accessible’, a word I hate. I don’t think that ‘difficult’ work is inaccessible to ‘most people’, I think that’s condescending. ISLAND TIME is a book that’s quite visibly influenced by theory but it is also not hard to understand these concepts. A lot of people who really like to read like the book, and a lot of people who literally never read told me they enjoyed the book. The cliché is useful. It’s a form we all share. In terms of what you’re saying about the mass of cultural data, the number of forms we have available to us— in a lot of ways I’m writing in a classically “post-modern” reference collage. People like Pynchon have been doing that since the 60s, in Anglophone literature at least. That’s a long history and I’m not inventing that. It’s just a now-more-than-ever type situation. And this connects back to my interest in ‘style’ as a concept in prose. Not to being it to AI, but that’s where we’re at now. That’s the first way people encounter the capabilities of these image-text generator machines: it’s like ‘Oh, they can do style transfers, they understand what a style is’. That concept as a stylel is mroe in the everyday cultural consciousness, as we were saying with Mad Men. Different texts, different images, different painters have different styles, and that’s sort of an essence that can be extracted by machines who have been trained on the full sum of human history. So that’s another reason why the idea of genre and style is particularly interesting to me right now. Because in a way you could almost describe my writing pieces as some king of really Barouque GPT prompt that’s like: ‘write a story about Kendall Jenner in the style of this and the style of this’.
TWIST: What do you think about the quest for originality? Do you feel like you’re doing something intuitive and natural or are you trying to come up with new formal structures and then break these too?
OLIVIA KS: Many people dismiss formal disruption as juvenile. Let’s take Honor Levy. She’s a completely different type of writer to me, much more literary. Obviously she uses a lot of internet speak, and on top of that, experiments with form. Certain people, especially in the literary establishment, see this type of work and are like— “that’s just an attention-grabbing gimmick, why do you need to do that right now? Why don’t you just tell the story that you want to tell?” To which I would say that forms are arbitrary and conventions are arbitrary. There’s an irritating teenage tendency in me to be like, well, why? Why does it have to be that way? There are people who ask that question and those who don’t. There are obviously good marriages of form and content where they make sense with each other, and I certainly strive for that. But with something purely conventional, like capitalisation— why not just do it however you want? In the case of ISLAND TIME, the all-caps are meant to evoek both text-based roleplaying games and screenplays, forms which are relevant to the content/themes. But even people who are just writing a normal Sally Rooney book could wRiTe LiKe This— why not?
> Ultimately what I’m interested is not just the form, but the meta-form? The ways that people think about creativity and approach making art. Where does inspiration come from? And that’s sort of similar with GPT. It’s like the meta-prompt— what can you do with that as an aesthetic medium in and of itself. How do we create meaning, literally, in the basic sense?
TWIST: I’m really intrigued, especially by this figuration of Instagram drafts as a type of medium or format. Do you have any posts on the draring board?
OLIVIA KS: Most of them are things that I did end up posting, but different versions of them. One draft was just photos of my vacation in Costa Rica. And just themes that I’m interested in. Like fountains. This was one of my forms that I had for a while. I wanted my Instagram to have my own meme language or recurring visual tropes. And in the ISLAND TIME book these are like “sparkle” and “cats”. And I love fountains. And I love smoothies.
> One other thing about me that plays into this style transfer question is that I have all these folders that are the same image but a little bit different. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s mostly just ads and products. I think it’s because I play games where you collect eggs and hatch them and they evolve into like, different versions of the same thing. Like one folder is just these lattés that this Japanese woman makes. I went through this woman’s blog and screenshotted every single thing. Very mentally ill of me.
TWIST: Given that you were writing this novel pre-GPT, do you feel much pressure to keep up with the pace of these socio-cultural trends and developments?
OLIVIA KS: Honestly no. No because I’m always really behind everything. I feel that in my life I was never the early adopter of anything. That’s more what my subject is, feeling constantly behind. I cam to Lil Peep 3 years later than most 16 year olds. I was like, fuck, this is so awesome. But I was already 20. It would have been a lot cooler if I’d written this in another time. As with GPT I don’t use it much anymore, especially the newest models. I don’t really play with them. They’re kind of banal. People trying to do things as fast as possible, and then they’re bad often.
> My main thing that I use is Tumblr. Every project I start is a new Tumblr. The way my brain works is just like the format of having a screen and lots of images. But I can’t use TikTok. There are things that are interesting to me about it, but I’ve already started not evolving in some way.
> I am really interested in interface design. Sometimes I wish that I had studied that. I’ve written about these projects a lot in more analytical ways, but there are a couple of groups that are trying to make interfaces that are in your physical environment. It’s like my nerdiest interest. Using projections, and basically the idea being, in my room I would have an operating system installed around me and I could programme different objects to have digital cues. Like if I picked up my cup, the instruction would be to make more coffee. That kind of stuff is so interesting to me.
TWIST: This being counter to the prevailing trend of interfaces whose mechanics are increasingly submerged beneath a digital veil, a direction perhaps best exemplified by VR. What is your take on VR, and its as-yet unrealised promises?
OLIVIA KS: It’s not that I have a huge problem with VR. I guess I’m more conservative or lib than I would think, where it does seem bad to overwrite our entire reality. In theory, yes, you can make any type of image in VR and I’m so down for that. I’m not a romantic, organic nature type person. But it’s like the new Legend of Zelda games. When it comes down to it they’re not that visually interesting. And I don’t think this is going to become better with better graphics. It’s just that we live in an extremely high-dimensional reality, and so why not add another dimension to that instead? Or let me put it this way. The thing that sucks about VR is that you can’t do AR in VR. Like you’re actually removing another level of mediation, even though you think you’re replacing it with more mediation. And that’s why AR is cooler. Because it’s like magic.
TWIST: It’s hard not to think of the Avatar movies here. Where the meaning of the title is about total immersion but to me those are examples of sci-fi in which the alien visuals are less interesting than the real-world technology producing them.
OLIVIA KS: I’m glad you bring that up because that movie— I was going to try and write about it at one point. Because when the new Top Gun came out, I loved it. I was like— this is so good. It’s also so stupid. I was trying to figure that out. Why is Avatar so boring to me, even though an algorithm would be like: yes, Olivia would like this, she like’s digital aesthetics. It’s so sparkly.
TWIST: Surely it has something to do with this aesthetic dead-end that you mentioned, somehting that is especially on display in the attempts made in Avatar 2 to digitally recreate the ocean. No matter how much detail you can capture, at some point you’re just adding resolution to a blue screen or desktop background.
OLIVIA KS: I think these examples tie in to my temporary take on VR. I don’t know if you saw Annihilation (2018). Those visuals were objectively better aesthetically. More tastefully donw. But also— you want to see that switch between Natalie Portman and something technological or magic or mediated, occuring within the space of the narrative. Which is the same with Top Gun. First you’re on the ground and then you’re in the plane. They didn some corny shit with that which was kind of dumb but also kind of worked. In the cinema I was in they had three walls all of a sudden when they were flying in the plane, it was like a video game. And that’s the thrill, of being in the normal world and then going on the rollercoaster of the plane ride. And that’s just not possible with Avatar. There’s no depth or differentiation in the experience of mediation.
- Text/Sam Harding
- Interview/Sam Harding/Ruby Bailey
- Design/Ruby Bailey
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