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’ve 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 surrounding 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, hmmm, 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 a style rather than an actual 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; 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 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