By Katie Chang

As we turn to digital nature, what happens to our relationship with the real, physical thing?

My family never flies.

We’re the road trip type. The camping and eating freeze dried spaghetti kind of family. We drive for hours and hours on end, and I rotate between scrolling on my phone and staring out the window as one version of White Sands blurs into the next, on and on and on. The landscape seems to unfold endlessly—it feels like we’re making no progress.

There are 473k more pictures under #whitesands. I guess we aren’t.

***

For about 95% of our species’ existence, we survived as hunter-gatherers, in tune with the natural world. We knew we were at the mercy of nature’s order, and calculated our every action accordingly. We followed the ebb and flow of the seasons, navigating the land with the intent to survive—just as other species did.

At some point, some luck-of-the-draw combination of factors (a shift in environmental patterns, a larger brain, and a big toe, perhaps?) allowed for the development of agriculture, and from there, our relationship with nature changed. It was no longer something we were both a part of and subject to. We could interrupt the natural seed dispersal process to get more wheat! We could fence up a group of pigs to have readily-available meat! Nature became something to dominate, something to control to fulfill our needs.



As mud villages turned into concrete cities and human labor turned into machine, the same regard for nature that enabled our mastery of agriculture sowed the seeds of capitalism. Our wheat dispersal hack is now a billion-dollar fertilizer industry. Our pig pen is a trillion-dollar meat market. From the comfort of our leather desk chairs in our glass high-rises, we’ve cemented our role as nature’s puppeteer, and in doing so, we’ve sucked the life out of Earth’s soil and ripped apart its atmosphere.

Yet, somewhere deep within our psyche, we know we’re missing something. Somewhere not yet poisoned by the gospel of economic growth, our primordial affiliation with nature survives.

So, to recreate what we have destroyed, we turn to technology. “Digital nature.” Virtual reality is on the rise. Video games featuring mythical woods and majestic mountains are more popular than ever. We can experience an outdoor run via an indoor treadmill. We can explore pristine beaches and luscious forests via #nature.

And the best part? We get to create it all ourselves. With cameras and desktops that offer the newest and greatest computational abilities, we can make digital nature just like the real, physical thing.

But when we watch hiking vlogs or experience virtual reality, we can only see the river flow and the trees sway. We do not feel the wind or smell the soil. We hear the sky thunder and the bushes rustle. But we don’t have to listen, because we aren’t worried about a storm approaching or a bear lurking around the corner. We know we aren’t at the mercy of the nature we experience because we created it all — it's under our control.

And that’s the problem. Inherent to nature is the process of living in relation with the other, not in domination over it. Digital nature, as a human creation—a product of our utmost control—is not the same. It doesn’t even come close. Its very existence is contradictory to nature itself.

Our attempt to recreate what we have destroyed is not only futile—it’s destructive. Digital nature is an extension of the exact phenomenon that elicited its necessity.

***

Smooth mounds of white gypsum blend into the painterly sky. The half-shrouded sun creates a soft glow over the deep blue mountains.



My vision goes black for 1/2000 of a second. There is a loading icon, then the photo I have taken reveals itself.

It’s just what I had envisioned. Better, even, compared to the ones I’ve seen. It’ll be the perfect cover for my White Sands post.

I lower my camera, and my eyes are flooded with light. My forehead is hot—maybe burnt. I recoil. I forget I am standing, completely exposed, in the middle of the desert.

And the desert is much bigger than it was through my lens: the mountain range wraps around me and there is a cottonwood tree to my left.

I blink. The wind picks up again, and silence fades into song, stillness into waltz. The sand hisses in dissent as it is strewn about by the wind, the birds flutter in harmony as they too are carried along. Even the clouds are swept away, and as the sun spills onto the desert floor, the lizards and mice emerge from their burrows. My senses are heightened as the desert comes alive, my skin tingles as the sun and wind and sand caress my body all at once, and something inside is pulled outwards—something under my skin yearns to break free and fuse into the life around me.

But it can’t. It’s tied down by the strap around my neck.

Suddenly, my camera weighs a thousand pounds. I have the urge to yank it off my body and throw it down the dune, watch it roll and roll until it is buried in the sand and the elements begin to break it down—the glass back into sand, the metal back into sediment. I wonder how it would feel to be here with no motive but to sit and soak up the way the wind tangles my hair and the sand tickles my skin—no preconception based off of the hundreds of photos and videos I’ve seen, no future Instagram post in the back of my mind. I wonder how it would feel to look at that cottonwood and see something that is just as alive as I am, that has veins and capillaries just as I do.



But I can only wonder. Because as soon as I saw the cottonwood, I deemed it an eye-sore: it didn’t match the way I expected White Sands to look, nor the way I wanted it to.

So I cropped it out. ■

In a world where mythology and its relationship with humans form a circle of creativity, comfort, and hope, technology shatters this fragile chain and inserts itself as the only possible answer.

In the southernmost corner of the sky, the vermillion bird perches on a mountain peak, hooked beak and talons sharp enough to slay gods gripping an imposing trunk. Its fiery red feathers burn a brilliant orange against the sunset. Shrewd eyes observe a mouse dart between grains and alert ears hear a bucket drop into a well. It’s waiting for its next ceremony — the coronation for a young king of a mighty nation — ready to bestow grace and glory.



Hidden in the dense woods, the king lies in a pile of his own blood. The foul odor permeates the air but nothing can fog the feral bloodlust of the hunter. She had a hunch that the king’s measly bodyguards would be no match for her rifle, loaded with .300 Winchester Magnum rounds. And now she knows that the vermillion bird would soon be a limp, cowardly version of itself.

Finally.

The sun dips into the valley. The stars blink into existence. The vermillion bird expands its massive wings. A boom, a screech, a thud: The scorching south is nothing but flesh and skeleton.



As mighty as any god, when faced with technology, the vermillion bird shrivels.

The hunter lifts her gun in victory.

Somewhere in one of the thousand villages dotting the coast, glittering sea brightly contrasting the drab and gray landscape, a widow with four children clutches her taser close to her chest. Besides the tattered blanket wrapped around her children, the taser is the last possession she has for protection. War is long and draining, both emotionally and financially.

“Will we survive?” one of the children asks.

The widow hesitantly nods. She wants to reassure them, but she’s not sure how. There’s a gaping hole in her, one she doesn’t know how to fill. No matter how much she grasps and searches, she still fumbles.

Sometimes, when the night is long and dark and smoke smothers all stars and the moon, she wonders if it’s always been so quiet and dull. She swears that her father’s voice, firm and hoarse, spoke tales of gods and dragons to her, but all the words she remembers are droplets of rain that don’t make sense together. The king dies, and the hunters rise to power: These are the proven facts, as irrefutable as the vermillion that never existed, that became a whisper in the wind.

Outside, a bomb explodes, and the widow drowns in her uncertainty.

In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, while the captain marvels at the hunk of metal designed to brave storms and rough terrains, a couple shivers in close pattern with the crashing waves.

The couple hugs each other. Eyes closed, hands clasped, and foreheads touching, they are determined to remember the country they have just left. It’s hard, though, especially since every breath they inhale tastes salty. A bit like their tears. A bit like the fear coating their tongues and brains. 



The man is thinking about his mother, but in these turbulent, uncertain times, he feels sad that he can only remember the spinning machine. It spun and whirled a hundred times faster, produced more efficiently than ever, but he can’t recall exactly what his mom was weaving. In his memory, the thousands of pieces of fabric were nothing but a blob of color, devoid of individualism and culture. Click clack, plop and hiss: He wonders if there was a time when his mother listened to other sounds besides metal against metal.

Then, he wonders what he will bring to this new land. 

“What will we give our children?” he asks his wife.

She lifts eyelashes to reveal dark, wet eyes. “I don’t know.”




To start from the beginning of the world means to start with mythology. Soaring above the human limits, beyond even technology, and fueled by hope and wonder, it is born out of uncertainty. The explosions of desire, the mystery of the unknown. Mythology at its core contradicts technology. Where one exists, the other cannot thrive.

When exhausted civilians retire from a day of tilling and harvesting, they look upon the pool of stars dripping down the night sky for comfort. They see two lonely souls desperate to reunite and the heavenly mother kind enough to weave the stars into a bridge. The sweat dripping onto the dusty grounds hints at the possibility of fruitless labor, but the warmly illuminated stars remind them of hope and solidity.

When tables are empty and white is all that can be seen, a weary mother hugs her sickly babies and remembers Tudigong, the Earth god. She’s already cried for the past two days, and the only reassurance left is that her baby will be taken care of in the afterlife. Gentle in appearance and nature, Tudigong embraces her agony and softens her raw edges.

This is the truth that people believe in when the tunnel is dark and the light is far. This is the truth that has achieved immortality. The branches of this ancient tree change and mold as societies and individuals evolve and adapt; however, the fundamental roots anchoring the trunk deep in the dirt remain the same emotionally and spiritually. Humankind’s belief in everything and nothing might disappear, but the remnants of stories that remain inside of them will last forever.

Societies are built from these remnants. A primitive giant cracks the chaotic world in half with his ax, and from his sheer strength comes the separation between yin and yang, land and sky, balance and creation. His statues stand tall and proud, full of purpose, duty, and responsibility. The Three Sovereigns, demigods at their core, use magic to improve lives and, at the same time, remind people of kindness and empathy. Lessons of courage and passion, virtue and loyalty: These leading principles become the foundations of human interaction and societal construction.



From these commonly accepted morals and ethics comes the establishment of law and order. The complex web that exists between mythology, culture, and value has become so intertwined and tangled that one cannot separate from the other without loosening the yarns making the string. Every interaction leads to another idea, which ultimately crosses the boundaries and dabs a hesitant foot into the creation of major belief systems that could go on to change the world. Destroy the massive pillars anchoring the roof to the floor, and the beautiful structures would subsequently collapse, too.

And when that happens, what will be left at the end of the world is rusting metal and toxic sludge. Technology gives people a sense of faux permanence. It comes in with its flashy gadgets and sweeps aside the shiny diamonds that have existed in minds for thousands of years. However, it will eventually erode and disappear, and the certainty it provided will burn to ashes. Left with no armor or shield, humans will end up struggling to grapple with the new reality, one where mythology hasn’t been provided a chance to grow and bloom into the protection it could be. 

In one world, a lovely goddess and her pure white rabbit reside in a heavyset house gleaming a dark maple red under the brilliant light of the sun.

In another world, the telescope forces people to look up and see the uglier truth: craters, eroded rocks, and one dusty footprint. ■

Here, nothing ever truly dies.

What if your wildest dreams came to fruition, only twenty years after you’d already forgotten about them?

Last night, I bore witness to the fresh seedling of a second chance. I stood one in a sweaty, eager sea of grungy adolescents ringing a vacant stage, peering over looming shoulders and tip-tapping my thumb against the thin strap of my bag. A thrum of anticipation hummed in the sparse air between us as we waited.

The crowd was young and eccentric, nodding heads adorned with cat-ear headbands and standing tall in thick-platformed boots. I was struck by the contrast when the band finally emerged, a collection of nondescript English men that had about twenty years on most of us. You’d almost believe they’d stumbled onto the wrong stage if not for the resounding cheer that erupted at the sight of them, the audience electrified by the reveal of a group once so shrouded in mystery.

Here, at last, was Panchiko.

“Good to see you’re all real people, too!” quipped frontman Owain as he looked out at us. The crowd responded with an uproar that carried an unspoken weight of understanding. We knew the serendipitous path of dissolution and resurrection that led them to this moment. It wasn’t simply that Panchiko’s fans loved them, or supported them, or streamed and shared their music for years to place them up on that stage.

No, it was more than that. They unearthed them.


Our path to excavation begins at the tail end of the twentieth century: cell phones are a luxury product; MP3 players are on the rise, but CDs remain in favor; and, in the U.K., Britpop is King.



In a teenager’s bedroom in Nottingham, a familiar scene unfolds: four school friends, armed with a Tascam digital recorder and boyish ambition, are recording a demo. They call themselves Panchiko, and they specialize in lush, lightly electronic 90s shoegaze. Cheekily, they name the album “D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L.”

They produce thirty copies of the demo and submit them to record labels for consideration, but to no avail. For a couple of years, they try their luck at the local music scene. They rehearse raucously in their drummer’s parents’ basement, one of the more soundproof spots they can access. They play sets to sparse crowds in local pubs, avoiding eye contact with their scattering of onlookers. They compete in “Battle of the Bands” competitions and lose each time.

Naturally, they’re having a blast.

But time keeps its pace and eventually catches hold of the boys, pushing them in opposing directions towards new sets of dreams. The original foursome plays their last show in a small-town festival to an uninterested crowd of onlookers and gently lay their dream to rest.

By 2002, Panchiko is no more.


But you’ve probably caught on by now that this story doesn’t end there.



In 2016, in a charity shop in Nottingham, U.K., Panchiko comes back to life— unbeknownst to its four founding members.

One of those thirty ill-fated demos has stood the test of time and sits resolutely well-worn on a shelf. The Japanese manga character on the album cover catches the attention of one shopper who picks it up and, unable to discern any further information as to its origin, purchases it and carries it home.

Intrigue deepens once they play the first song and find the audio is noticeably distorted: a fuzzy, static sound overlays the barely-audible melodic track. The CD, in its twenty-year recess, has been affected by disc rot, a condition affecting CDs over time that warps the audio quality.

Eager to discover more, our thrift-store archeologist picks up the CD and places it enthusiastically in the outstretched palm of the Internet. They upload it to 4chan’s /mu/ board, where music lovers from the depths of the web converge to trade in obscurities and conspiracy theories — the perfect breeding ground for a cult classic of the digital age.

The demo makes its rounds, trickling into various corners of internet subculture and growing a fanbase of its own. People are drawn to the music, which is experimental, clearly inspired by the late 90s shoegaze wave but featuring unique sampling methods and electronic elements that, paired with the distortion, make it sound almost retrofuturistic.

The origin of this long-forgotten disc is untraceable; no one has ever heard of the album, nor the band, and there is no record of them ever having existed on the Internet. The album’s back cover lists only the band members’ first names and the year of its origin. Online speculation runs wild.

No one is able to find another copy of the demo. Everybody wants an answer.

In 2020, they finally get one. It comes in the form of a one-word affirmation from Owain that this is, in fact, his band’s record, after a member of the Panchiko Discord group tracks him down on Facebook and sends the query. By now, the demo has taken on a life of its own; the band members that are still in contact with one another Google “Panchiko” and are shocked to find pages upon pages of forums and message boards dissecting their teenage dalliance with musicmaking. Messages from fans begin to flood in.

The following year, revived and reunited, Panchiko plays their first show in Nottingham in over two decades. There is no awkward smattering of applause this time; everyone has come here to see them. They play the opening chords to “D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L.” Once the cheering subsides, they are mirrored by a swaying crowd of their biggest fans, mouthing along to every word.


The awareness that something is tenuous, that your hold on it is circumstantial, that in any other alignment of events you may never have known it at all — this gives it value. The things we create may outlive our conviction to see them succeed; a dream doesn’t necessarily die alongside our belief in it.



“I’d find the CD every couple of years when we were cleaning out the house,” says Owain in a interview. He claims he’d think to himself, “thank god, I’m glad that CD isn’t on the internet.”

“D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L” has since been reproduced in CDs and vinyls, available to purchase on Bandcamp (“Pop it in a charity shop for 20 years for that crispy crunchy sound!”, the product description reads). It’s also been uploaded to streaming services. The Spotify version of the album features seven original tracks and four “rot” versions— transferred directly from that pivotal disc.

I find myself turning to these “rotted” tracks more often than their well-preserved counterparts. The first song of Panchiko’s I’d ever heard was the damaged version of “D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L,” recommended to me by a friend enmeshed in the world of online forums. I was, much like the others, intrigued by the mystery and entranced by the music, the distortion providing evidence to the mythos.

The rot appeals to the nostalgic in me; it’s as though you can hear the years on the track, physical proof of the time Panchiko sat idle. I listen and am embraced by the sentimentality of a time before my own, constructed by a group of teenage boys who held no idea of what the next few decades were to bring them. All they’d wanted was to make music.


Onstage in Texas, Panchiko begins playing “Laputa”, a wistful track inspired by Hayao Miyazaki’s “Castle in the Sky.”

The songs they sing were penned by teenagers in a bedroom twenty years ago, and hearing them in the flesh all these years later feels like catching a glimpse of a perfectly-preserved moment in the lives of four teenage boys I’ve never met but can picture so clearly through the sound.

Panchiko’s music exists in a unique liminality, bridging the gap in time between streaming-service supremacy and the CD age. “D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L” serves as a sonic time capsule: an album that made its way into the public’s ears over two decades after its inception, emerging into a wholly different musical realm and industry than the one it was born into.

The past twenty years have marked a massive shift in the way we create, distribute, and consume media. When Panchiko made their demo, the widespread popularity of streaming services was years away. Now, physical music is nearly obsolete. Records are retro and discs collect dust in bygone childhood bedrooms.

Now, the band croons years-old lyrics to a generation absolutely besotted with nostalgia for the early aughts, an era they can hardly remember — if at all. They find kinship in a set of adolescents who experience the world of music in a fundamentally different way than they once did. They prove how bendable, how entirely unpredictable this life of ours is.

In reviving their past, they split the future wide open. ■

Watch accompanying video here.

By Aaron Boehmer

I transform into an excavation site. I pick the dirt beneath each of my fingernails and unearth the boy within me.

Our bones used to be flexible.

They get harder as we age. They become far more likely to break like brittle than bend like butter. In elementary school, it was weirdly chic to break a bone or two. Maybe because it signaled to us prepubescent creatures that we were approaching a coming-of-age. I never wanted to break any bones, though.

I would have much rather ripped my throat out. I would have much rather traded my voice for a different one — if only I could.

I can imagine it now – my exposed throat in the open ocean with all the salt in the world to cleanse the wounds. As the waves wash into my larynx, out of my larynx, and into it again, I relish in the good burn. Finally, as I always dreamed of when I was young, the water takes my vocal cords with it. My tongue, tangled in seaweed, leaves without a goodbye.

When I speak again, I growl. I get dirty and let the sweat dry. I don’t care how I smell.

In and amongst all the musk, I finally become a boy.

But it’s all a mirage. In reality, against all I yearned for, my voice never reached a resonance any deeper than my mother’s. Growing up, I saw having a higher-pitched, flared voice as a loss – something to mourn.

I do not want to grieve any longer. I commit to a digging into myself — a meditation of self-archaeology. I transform into an excavation site.

I chose a cave to make my own.
I chose Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc. 

A revel of Upper Paleolithic life in southeastern France, the Chauvet Cave holds some of the best-preserved cave paintings in the world. Its body — its contours, its scars, its stomach full of bear bones – sways to a history I hear from 5,000 miles away.

Whispers of grinding dust echo through the walls of the cave. The phantom chatter of those long dead sing a hymn as old as 30,000 B.C.E. 



I listen. 

I feel an energy. I hear a young boy’s hands digging in red and black paint. He dances his fingers along the rocks, leaving behind handprints, lions, and bison. His physical body left the Earth long ago, but his spirit remains engraved inside Chauvet’s body.

The spirit always finds a way back.

Chauvet’s stomach rumbles. Threads of clay fly from the corners of the cave, weaving into a network of veins, nerves, muscles, and skin. A figure materializes before me.

I recognize him. The young boy, long dead, returns like he never left.

This is a story unbound by death.

When our eyes meet, the boy runs to me with open arms. I smell a strong whiff of lavender as we embrace. I smell a scent untouched by warped self-perception brought on by the clogged machine of profit, pain, and power. I smell a scent that the boy chose for himself because he likes the smell of summer blooms — and I do too.

We sit on stones across from each other — two artifacts from the past and present trying to make sense of the future. He shows me trinkets from throughout the years — rocks shining like tarnished metals, animal hide turned to leather, and deer antlers sculpted into hammers.

The boy’s voice sounds like mine before I threw it in the tide. He speaks without mind to how a boy is supposed to sound — a symphony of feminine and masculine all at once. I long to join his orchestra.



He asks if I’ve collected any objects. I look at my hands – all but empty aside from dirty fingernails.

The boy points to them. 

“Where does the dirt come from,” he asks.

I tell him about the grime that culminated underneath each one. Nail by nail, I unearth pieces of myself, breaking the bolts of the coffin I buried my voice inside.

The playground, I say to the boy. Looking down at my thumbs, I tell him about the future.

We play on hot tar with yellow lines, orange rubber spheres, and tall metal poles. We run through sharp green blades and gray dust as we search for who we can trust, what we want to be, and where we want to go.

I remember when I was young and running through those grass fields. I remember a sweaty boy behind me.

He asked if a girl lived inside me because I sounded like one.

That day was the first time I dug my nails into myself, scratching the surface of my burial site and opening a wound in my throat. The sweat dripped down from the boy’s brow, seeping into the lesion, and burning my larynx.

I flick the dirt from under my thumbs to the side.

A few years later, boys got sweatier. I remember sitting on cold tile floors when a boy leaned over to a girl and whispered a secret.

I found out the boy told the girl that I sounded like a girl.

When I got home from school later that day, I sunk my nails into the soil of my skin like teeth to a Honeycrisp apple.

More and more sweat from the boys around me dripped into the festering tendrils of my vocal cords.

In these instances, I don’t remember if I ended up crying at lunch or when I got home, but either way, I cried alone like a girl over being told I seemed like a girl.

I hated my voice, I tell the boy in the cave. But it was not just that. Whether it was the way I sounded or someone seeing me cry, I didn't want to be perceived as vulnerable or weak.

Femininity was the antithesis of boyhood. To be a boy was to be a part of a machine that accepted masculinity and eliminated femininity in all forms, even within boys themselves.

The boy in the cave says nothing. He lets my voice bear bristles against the walls of Chauvet, adding to the history set against the curves of the rocks.

I push the dirt from under my index and middle fingernails and fling it on the ground.




As I got older, the boys got even sweatier. I remember the cacophonous noises of hard-soled shoes clanking against the concrete. a boy started talking to me. I don't remember what he said, but when I answered, he mocked my voice. He spoke higher and more nasally and then laughed.

That afternoon was the final catalyst. With fingers deep inside my neck, I grabbed onto my larynx and pulled and pulled and pulled. Like acid rain, the sweat from the boy’s forehead poured onto my throat. Holding the larynx in my hands, it sputtered out steam, pulsating like a heart torn from one’s chest.

The remnants of this scene lay under the nails of my ring and pinky fingers. I pick the dirt and blood from beneath them, casting them into the pile I created inside the cave.

I close my eyes for a moment. When I open them again, I look down. My hair falls forward in ringlets as I notice my fingernails once more – clean.

I hear the boy in the cave take a deep breath, but he still doesn’t say anything. His silence floats in the space around us, unlocking the latch pin glued onto the coffin I once shoved myself inside.

Finally, I escaped. I take a deep breath, and then draw it out even longer.  

Femininity was natural for me, I tell the boy.

In order to assume the role of a boy, I rejected my nature to be seen as natural in the eyes of sweaty boys.

But there is nothing natural about machines.

I look up from my hands to the boy in front of me, who has remained quiet since I began recounting all these past ills.

Our eyes lock and then I notice a lesion in his throat. I look down at his hands, and then his fingernails – dirty.

Blood and mucus drip from his neck and onto an object in his lap.

I see the ruins of my throat – my tongue, my larynx, and my vocal cords. The things I discarded throughout my childhood finally found their way back to me. 

I accept my throat from the boy in front of me, returning it to its original place.

All the sweat in the world could not disintegrate my larynx. Thank God salt preserves rather than consumes. It was only a matter of time before I found my voice again.

The boy and I lock eyes one last time. We share a smile as he turns back to dust. A cool wind pulls his ashes towards me.

In the end, we merge. ■