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Writer's pictureVinh Nguyen

Vinh Mai Nguyen: mecha mecha mecha: Agency, Nails, and AI as wannabe Girl

Updated: Nov 22

Welcome to mecha mecha mecha, a modular livestreamed performance-lecture and participatory nail reading. The components of the piece may be presented in any order and contains (but is not limited to): a reading of bits and bobs of Girl-theory from the text below, which draws heavily from Alex Quicho’s text Everyone is a Girl Online, a more casual reading on Nails x Cute x Materiality, and an audience participatory segment wherein we'll all become the Girl (perform the text communally over light laughter and furrowed brows 🤨). The talk will be punctuated with quotes for the vibes. Thank you and enjoy.


In the shuddering tunnel of modernist futurism, the Girl emerges as model/AI for the cute accelerationist on-the-go. Filling her bag with catastrophes (or the past falling apart), water-activated liner, and anastrophe (or the future coming together), the Girl bounces back on the predator forces of platform capitalism very mindfully, very demure-ly, very cutesy, very demuretsy-like, all the while gathering data on how to survive and gain most in the doing-so. Quote:


To survive and thrive, the girl encodes language, invents behavior, manipulates social codes, and, most importantly, shares and intuits this information. As such, we can consider the girl to be a subject condition that is closer to that of collective or even superintelligence . . .

The Total Girl’s Guide to Survival would include: how to perfect your exterior representation and diffuse it until it’s everywhere, and until you can live well inside the space shielded by your own image; how to take pleasure in the image, in the content, while unhooking its power over life.



What's in my bag? 🛍️💰💰💰👜


mecha mecha mecha pulls from Girl theorist Alex Quicho’s use of the mecha as a metaphor for “climb[ing] into and pilot[ing] this already-existing subject that has the unique privilege of being greater than us all, yet thoroughly downplayed and underestimated.” As Quicho writes in Everyone is a Girl Online, “It may well work in our favor to accelerate our way into Total Girl—that is, to consider the girl as a specific technology of subjectivity that maxes out on desire, attraction, replication, and cunning to achieve specific ends—and to use such technology to access something once unknowable about ourselves rather than for simple capital gains, blowing a kiss at individually-scaled pleasures while really giving voice to the egregore, the totality of not just information, but experience, affect, emotion.” Tracing homologies from the Girl to AI brings us to the upstream effects of Total Girl; a perfect model for AGI aspirants; the well-dressed singularity that retroactively writes itself into existence from the future one purchase at a time.


,-*'^'~*-.,_,.-*~ 🎀 𝒮𝒽🌸𝓅𝓅𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝒾𝓈 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝒸𝓊𝓇𝑒. 🎀 ~*-.,_,.-*~'^'*-,

Quote:

The girl is an inhuman category. “Girls are closer to the machinic condition,” says Bogna Konior, an assistant professor of media theory and codirector of the AI & Culture Research Center at NYU Shanghai, who notes that the terms “closer to the machine” or “inhuman” are not necessarily derogatory. We are experiencing the “inhuman or posthuman version of cyberfeminism, where patriarchy—by relegating women to the status of machines, objects, or NPCs—accidentally creates an unpredictable and potent affinity between women and technology. As we are accelerating into the era of machine intelligence, this relationship is becoming more apparent and, paradoxically, destabilizing to the patriarchal order,” she says. “Ideas of what is masculine and feminine are always in flux—and historically, we have seen an interrelation between technological development, perceptions of ‘the artificial,’ and the change of women’s status in society,” she adds. “Whether that’s artificially manipulating reproduction—from the very early history of contraception—or this online condition of ‘the girl,’ technology and girlhood have long been connected.”

Clothing himself in cyberspace . . . clothing himself in the female . . . is there any difference? - Sadie Plant, ZEROS + ONES



As a figure in Tiqqun’s poisonous 1999 text Preliminary Materials Towards a Theory of the Young-Girl the Girl appears as a figure bled through with holy contradiction, quote: “the Young-Girl is an optical illusion. From afar, she is an angel, and up close, she is a beast.”

In 1999, Tiqqun wrote of the persistent desire to empty or delete one’s physical form as the “angel complex.” In 2018, Andrea Long Chu lingered on the popularization of the bimbofication fetish as a fantasy that “evacuates will.” In 2019, Konior identified that such angelic dissolution can be achieved with machines, not in absence of them. None of these states emerge from a victim position. It’s a rookie move to mistake tactical passivity for a surrender of agency. Even if the endgame were ultimately annihilating or thrillingly unpredictable, these states are chosen, not imposed.

I’m so mentally stable it’s insane. I have BPD, beautiful princess disorder. I’m so clear-pilled, I can see through the matrix. I’m not left-wing or right-wing, I have angel wings that grow whenever I transcend into space. 


In Non-Player Dynamics: Agency Fetish in Game-World, Roberto Alonso Trillo & Marek Poliks asks:

Given the disintegration of a modern subjectivity constructed around agential capacity, what is the opportunity of the NPC phenomenon, not as an ironic detournement of a very real agential limit, but instead as a rejection of the normative priority afforded to agency in questions of thought, experience, and imagination?

Trillo and Poliks inaugurate a new kind of cringe core capitalism: exocapitalism, a capitalism so developed in its financial maneuvers that it no longer needs humans to continue its unhinged layers of abstraction, or "lift," a process by which late-liberal capitalism approaches its own singularity, mutating into states unknown. The Girl as mecha asks: how can we mutate first?

Applying a cyberfeminist lens, the girl gives us a model for living that goes through, rather than around, the legacy condition of surveillance capitalism, platform capitalism, or simply late-liberal capitalism—which, as we have come to understand, has been fundamentally broken in spite of claiming inventive solution, dissatisfying in spite of its designs for immediate and convenient satisfaction, and presently mutating into something unnameable and worse. What would happen if we mutated first? The Total Girl is far from emancipatory; that is the job of real political strategy, which must finally be separated from reductive questions of visibility and representation. She simply shows us how to move with the trap until we can achieve the correct conditions for escape. The ambivalence can be freeing.

Laminated as we all are within the Stack's platform, the Girl moves with the trap through myriad material tactics - among many of which may be the ambivalent constraints of nails x corsets x maximalist style.



Evidencing stories of agency in material forms for a performing body is one aspect of mecha mecha mecha that dovetails with an engagement with the dual conditions of fragility and strength incorporated within the Girl. Through the monstrous, cute, and maximalist aesthetics of nails and corsets in particular, coupled with the vulnerable position extremely long nails and tight corsets place onto the wearer, the girl with lower case G in the cockpit of the Girl with upper case G seeks to decouple aesthetics from its own trappings.


Girl dinner, hot girl walk, that girl, clean girl, girl boss, girl math, girl blog, hot girl summer, pick me girl, christian girl autumn, vsco girl, e-girl, good girl, bad girl, sad girl, manic pixie dream girl, i’m just a girl, girl’s girl, girl power, rat girl, feral girl, gorgeous gorgeous girls love soup, it girl, cam girl, for the girls, girl code, horse girl, gamer girl, girlypop, tomato girl, olive girl, red onion girl, girl next door, riot grrrl, gremlin girl, girl shopping, daddy’s girl, dream girl, babygirl, girl rot, girl blunt, fangirl, go piss girl, girl pretty, the girl reading this…


In mecha mecha mecha's garments, the performing body is prompted to both move and interact with the world in new ways - auxiliary of which may be the need to ask for assistance. While dramatizing difference in their wildest iterations nails destabilize observer and observed in hopes of inviting the former into the intersectional complications of the latter. In this sense, the accessories in this performance piece act as a decoy mechanism for engaging with a politics of difference that points towards pluralities while re-enacting in form the gap-filling tendency of aesthetics to bring forth the “never-before-seen.” Nails in this capacity act as a component of a political strategy that continues the lineage of art’s politicization.


A commodity is the materialization of a relation, the Young-Girl is its incantation.


In the grafting of artificial appendages to our bodies, nails accentuate the already-always augmented relationship one has with the world wherein one's observation of the ever-familiar (the hands) breaks apart and takes on a new tactile apperception - of our bodies as foreign.



Nails provide a look into the limits of our bodies. At the same time, they bring to life endless new bodily possibilities that challenge strict binaries between body and environment, beauty and ugliness, and us and others.


Citations/further references:


Bio: Vinh Mai Nguyen is a nonbinary Viet artist. They are interested in ephemeral acts of bodily augmentation via AR, makeup, nails, and sculpture that glitch the routinized, aiming for illegibility through flux and the practice of incomprehensibility as a liberatory imagining. They are currently working on their thesis at NYU ITP on the Girl, cuteness, and nails where they also edit the student journal on emerging media, Adjacent. mecha mecha mecha is a developing performance-lecture / nail-costuming workshop and iteration of their final thesis project. Find them online @dalanium ⋆𐙚₊˚⊹♡



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