Fabiola Larios, Gremlin, and Vivian Fu are featured on this week's episode of Nicstalgia. We talk about making a critical statement through subversive glitter art, Dollz, cute internet sounds (what glitter sounds like), and early digital technology.
We dive deep on social media and identity, exploring how digital personas evolve, how social media became a romanticized performance, and the psyops behind manufactured illusions of vulnerability. Turns out, photo dumps, making songs in your bedroom, and crying on TikTok aren’t “authentic” after all. (Let it be known that Vivian started “dumpage theory”, dissecting performative ugliness online.)
We get into the psychology of the internet and optics of surveillance capitalism, looking at people as statistics in order to sell to them, and the lengths creators, influencers, and people with public-facing personalities on the internet will go to in order to be seen. We think about how to approach being online heuristically, where critical thinking, research, and media literacy help people discern what they see.
Whether you’re a creator or consumer of content, you’ll enjoy the candidness of our discourse around internalizing and rejecting the “influencer” moniker, having self-worth and acceptance as a creator, how to not care about algorithms, and dealing with the pressure of being ~always online~. Our heads are already in the future, thinking about how artificial intelligence (AI) impacts the creative process and how web3 will disrupt web2 economies of scale, aka. how musicians will make money from their work instead of the streaming/social platforms.
About our Guests
Fabiola defines herself as a Net Art AI Internet Glitter Artist, her work is about the representation of the self on the Internet, the vulnerability of personal data, and our digital footprint focusing on surveillance with digital and physical objects.
Gremlin is a Los-Angeles based creator who specializes in digital audio art. She makes pop music under the name Boule Goes Boing and creates experimental generative audio as gremlin_bb. When she’s not making music, Gremlin interviews web3 creators for Rusty Rollers Radio on Twitter and acts as a Category Lead for the web3 networking group Friends with Benefits. She loves analog synthesizers and heavy 808s.
Vivian is some girl who was once on tumblr but now works in tech.
Connect with Our Guests
Fabiola: Twitter 〰 Instagram
Connect with Nic
TikTok 〰 Instagram 〰 Twitter 〰 Substack
Special Thanks 💖
Doll Artwork by @hmdraws_
Theme Music by @egmusicnyc
Intro Video by @valentinareyes9
YouTube CC available in English and Español
Episode Transcript