The sunlight casts manta ray shapes upon the shadowed surface of the opposing cabin walls, filtering through airplane windows like gelatin. It is my sixth aircraft in a week, the flight attendants require confirmation that I feel capable of opening the door in the event of an emergency, I do. I stretch into the legroom, the entertainment system asks, “what are your ambitions for this flight?” as though everyone always knows what they’re working towards. The airline loses my luggage, I argue with them on the phone, drift around town and then RSVP ‘Yes’ to some VIP dinner a half hour before it begins, ready to show up haggard in my airplane clothes. The taxi driver cruises down a long bright highway telling me 500,000 people have flown in to the city today.
I make my way to the restaurant rooftop, trying to compose myself into something presentable with an old rescued stick of eyeliner, and I hear someone saying my name. I don’t know anyone at this dinner, I don’t think I even know anyone in Texas, but I look up from the doorway. A face slowly fades into familiarity, the way that you can gradually make out shapes once your eyes adjust to a dark room. In a previous life, she and I have briefly orbited each other as she guest-lectured in the dining room of my grad school. We’d never spoken, but been aware of each other on the instagram and through common friends and a shared interest in the Myanmar punk scene.
With warmth and surprise, we acknowledge how we are now meeting in a different dimension of reality than we’ve always known each other in. She is also going to the same dinner, it turns out, and I explain the predicament I’m in. “Kismet,” she says, reaching into her purse and suddenly pulling out an asymmetrical leather miniskirt. It’s a unique piece manufactured by a fashion company her crypto hedge fund has invested in, that she so happens to be carrying around. I get changed, it fits, and strangers in the bathroom tell me it’s a great outfit. She and I know peculiar details about each other, I remember she manufactures her own line of deodorant, or underarm balm, as a side hustle. There is an immediate intimacy to our conversation, as it traces the outline of people from our past and where our lives have placed us now, a quickening comfort from knowing a world we’ve both inhabited before, from sharing clothes and makeup. She is throwing a rooftop party later and puts me on the guest list, I glide past the club entrance line into red-lit rooms and stay out past 2 AM drinking soda water by the stage as rappers perform, my body still adjusting to being back in America and unaware of when to be awake.
This dinner, and every dinner through the week, is full of scintillating conversation and laughter. Talking about AI is inescapable, but here it feels surprisingly refreshing. I’m surrounded by industrial designers who work on brain-computer interfaces, computer vision specialists, AI interaction designers, PhD students building transformable robots that fold up delicately like insect wings. Others are helping delivery trucks look around themselves and understand the world. We end up talking about my favorite humanoid roboticist who had made a mechanized replica of himself, sending it as a proxy to lectures and events he didn’t want to attend, how he updates his own face by periodically getting plastic surgery to match the youthful perfection of his robot twin. Other speakers trade their highlights so far, recommending stalls and pavilions and especially one where they were handing out the killer combination of a free headshot, a yogurt parfait and a vibrator.
In a sprawling ballroom, Hideo Kojima launches the trailer for Death Stranding 2, quietly beaming, and it feels like we are all particles caught in his exhale of relief and joy at finishing another masterpiece. The actors playing the video game characters walk onto the stage, each a spinoff humanoid form of a familiar 3D object.
Part of the company responsible for the Lytro camera (I own the first gen, a brilliant turquoise tube capturing the wholeness of moments through their light field) has branched off into making holograms and volumetric haptic displays. We move through an array of lite scientific explanations, Peppers Ghosts of Tupac and Narendra Modi and certain assorted dinosaurs. Later, John Maeda summarizes his annual design and tech observations, AI agents are everywhere - this year’s report is a formalization of how interfaces are essentially moving into the next level of abstraction. I feel like we are becoming more abstract as a species, dispersing, moving into more realms of air and thought, perhaps in a way that may eventually return us to the earth.
I meet C for lunch, the ramen shop specifically prohibits carrying guns inside. We comply. I catch him up to everything that’s changed since we’d last met in India, giddy on ten-course meals and trading semiconductor stock options. He’s in a brief spell of unemployment due to legal errors, and we discover we’ve been using the same lawyers. He tells me about his experience of having children and how it makes you feel a kind of love that’s incomprehensible and all-consuming. I think of an essay I read once about a father’s experience of watching the moonlight play upon the face of his infant daughter sleeping, and the knowledge that he would never completely know the person she would grow into, and never be able to fully protect her.
— — —
I return to SXSW, there are more realities to wander. A long carpeted doorway with a slice of red carpet. It leads into a convention room studded with alternate realities, and I enter a glass chamber with an old-school slide projector placed upon a table. The headset layers realities seamlessly, I can walk around and a table appears with figures sitting across each other. With each slide I switch physically in the projector, there is a satisfying click sound, the light changes and it conjures up nostalgic views of a city lost to time and human intervention. The nostalgia in the fragments of film and conversation trickle through to the physical objects, everything a relic from a time past.
Inside an ingenious exhibit called Echovision, I become a bat. I am directed to a darkened space, where they give me a handheld bat mask that holds a phone, relying on its LIDAR sensors to convert sound into visuals. In the pitch black room, behind a mask, I mumble for a moment and then shriek repeatedly to navigate - and the sound waves turn into bright red magnetic-field-like lines, illuminating an array of soft foam pillars as I move through the room.
Later, I settle into a low eggshell-shaped orange chair outside, inside a different headset - living the POV of a spore in a mycelial network. I am about to encounter some queer fungus that is trained on a mix of erotic poetry and fragments of the Smithsonian archives. A glowing orb asks me to stretch my arms out to convince a floating mushroom to read me generated poetry. It widens as I move, speaking absurdities at me in a breathy voice and providing instructions on further movement. I flap my arms as though I am a low-flying bird, but then I glide them slowly like my hypothetical wingspan would’ve been greater than the actual length of my arms, because in VR you can be anything.
Back in the real world, we go as a group to watch snatches of a French-Japanese interpretive dance presentation about a transhumanist cryogenic AI cyborg sentient creature, a two-person abstract retelling of their process, abruptly breaking into spells of calm droning synth music and a geometric dance explanation of how the Z-axis is perceived differently by different kinds of software. Expressive hands, and heads and bodies bending over backwards. As a group, we slink out of the ballroom midway.
I’m falling asleep at 7pm from the jetlag, eyes closing as I whisper compound words to my Duolingo owl. I have vivid dreams, and then the same semi-recurring dream that my dog is very mad at me, I try to take him on a walk at night, while we live someplace that looks like a dark Tokyo suburb with my parents.
— — —
The next day, I return to the place full of alternate realities. J and I take some red carpet photos, and then sit inside some interactive music videos, polygonal blocks flying at our heads, colorful streaks of digital rain, I keep walking to the edges of windows and corridors to see if anything breaks. We enter something like a high-production classical music version of Beat Saber x Fruit Ninja - tapping my fingers together, I select the first option, Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and slice away objects as they enter my field of view.
Every afternoon here, I end up in some kind of death-centered or afterlife-adjacent experience. Weaving through exhibits, I suddenly see a familiar name and silhouette walking past. An unexpected reunion with someone who was once family - she is exhibiting a VR film about nuclear war. It is a first-hand experience of absolute annihilation and desolation, as Pompeii-ishly frozen moments of pain give way to the silvery dissolution of all life forms, and the planet itself. We end up having one of the most cathartic conversations of my entire life, with this realization of how long we have known each other, and how she has seen me grow up over the past decade in various parts of the world. I leave with my soul much lighter, with answers, and warmth, and a sense that love endures.
— — —
The SXSW expo takes place inside a bright-lit convention center, a marketplace of oddities and skincare, technology proof-of-concepts and photography services, travel agencies and 3D printers and weird instagrammable ‘immersive ecology’ projection chambers. Someone gives me a ‘non-surgical facelift’ on the left side of my face. I walk around the Japan Pavilion with my two-face, where they’ve showcased a twistable drone, an avatar-maker that transforms me into Samurai, and apps to help you organize your time and space.
There is so much joy in these streets. Cars drive past spilling over with people in costume. My boots feature in someone’s Tiktok video. Outdoor performances at every corner - I had almost forgotten this was a music festival too, this is how I would once discover new bands to love. J and I end up at dinner in the same place as the entire delegation of the Japan pavilion, we try to blend in, we debrief the day and our lives.
— — —
On the morning of our presentation, my weapon-like organic 3D ice-sculpture-spider ring cuts J across the arm and they start bleeding, moments before we set up for our workshop. People are sitting on the floor lining up outside, we’re sold out. I wrote about it here, a little more corporately. We go to a Texas BBQ place for lunch, the meat has absolutely no seasoning, it tastes like pure empty texture and barbecue sauce. Inside the Museum of the Future dome, we find a surprise Refik Anadol exhibit, and we discover the marvel that is Dubai chocolate along with some kadak masala chai.
In between events, I sit on a white couch, sipping on awful mushroom coffee. Interesting people rotate through on the couch opposite me, like a game show. Somebody wants to discuss red-teaming AI, someone explains Gaussian splats to me, then a man looks straight at me and tells me my gift is that I can see the future before it happens.
That night we dine with the VIPs of the Artificial Intelligence Speaker track, gossiping with diplomats about the vampire-like qualities of Bryan Johnson. Copies of someone’s newly published book are handed out, the author says he co-founded the internet along with Tim Berners-Lee. Drunken inscriptions, everyone exchanging LinkedIns. Lawyers are branching out into the world of AI legislation, copyright law has never been this hot.
I settle tired into the back of a dark movie theater watching a Polish art film set in the demolished beautiful ruins of an old crumbling Renaissance building with a lush garden. There is some invisible technology embedded into the walls, three women who rehearse trying to convincingly play dead, perhaps to escape. If their hands could just go limp enough, if they could hold their breath outside their body for long enough, and leave their eyes open glazing over, their bodies so heavy to the touch. The setting reminds me briefly that I once dreamt of owning a castle, maybe I will someday.
Back in VR, J and I are enclosed within a film about reproductive rights, a young girl talks about her experiences with abortion. She told her partner she was pregnant, he said she didn’t mean anything to him and blocked her on all channels. The young woman gathers funds for the appointment, and gets chased down by pro-life protestors. Shaded illustrations of hospital rooms. She talks about the intense physical pain when it’s finally done, she talks about how much she wants to be a mother. I’m shaken from the sheer intensity, and have to stay quiet for a long time afterward.
— — —
The next day, it’s J’s birthday - it’s just the two of us in the house now so I surprise them with some cake and pull out an engraved lighter for birthday candles. It’s the most Tumblr-esque object I own, and they laugh at the emo sentence carved into it, and make their birthday wish. I hope it comes true.
I begin the day at the cinema, watching a Japanese film about the people manning understaffed crisis and suicide hotlines. A lonely man in Tokyo says, “I wake up every day saying to myself - Oh, I’ve woken up, again.”
I slip out of the theatre to go fly an evTOL aircraft. J and I lucked into a spot each, completed instructional sessions and flying simulators. During flight training, I am weighed and I find out I am 20 pounds lighter than I had estimated, I realize I weigh less than I did when I moved to America. I vow to take better care of myself, I was disappearing. I watch the aircraft from afar - a giant helicopter drone, studded with 18 propellors held up by individual batteries (to be replaced after every flight). Like a large insect or a sentinel from The Matrix, it sits on the ground on six awkwardly outstretched war-of-the-worlds-ish legs, compound eyes in the front watchful in all directions.
J flies first, taking in the geomorphology of downtown Austin cityscape, graffiti growing from the rooftops beneath them.
My helmet fitted, I climb into the aircraft, strap in and complete radio checks. Hand curved around the joystick, I take off and my body floods with a sudden relaxing sensation. A liquid stillness, like slowly breathing underwater. We are geofenced in so as to not collide with buildings, I quickly ascend and hit the altitude limit but float close to the top, the display screams with a red rectangle, the aircraft sways forward and charges ahead, twists around at my behest. Being suspended in air is like being at sea, briefly existing outside of time.
Walking down the street at midnight from one red-lit concert to the next, I feel safe in this city where everyone is awake and alive. Halfway home, I am stopped by the sight of some kind of arena, monochrome light reflecting off of hundreds of faces caught in a downward cascade of harsh noise and I immediately love it. From a distance, the seating arrangements and strobe lights remind me of those walls of death in small-town carnivals back home, where motorcyclists drive around the edge while the crowds cheer on. I become one of them for a little while, all of our faces melting off like black ink leaking at the mercy of a punk band.
Unsilencing notifications on my phone, I see a text message from A asking about a dream I had once, piercing through our jagged silence for a fleeting second before diving back into it. A simultaneous rupture like being punched in the face, like a whale breaching.
— — —
On the last day of the VR showcase, my persistence pays off and I’m allowed into the experience I had most wanted to see, by a company called Tender Claws. (J and I had actually first met on Zoom, and then inside a Tender Claws immersive theater show in VR). I don’t know how long I was in there, it could have been hours, could have been lifetimes. This was today’s daily life/death experience.
We start as cowboys in a Western, a sparse sandy landscape comprised of a sole cactus and a horse. I raise my gun, and I shoot the horse. Then I become the horse. As this dead horse, I ascend up an escalator toward, presumably, heaven. Another escalator beside me moves in the opposite direction, I look over at a penguin, I become this penguin, and I’m riding an elevator. I’m asked to make a choice somewhere, and end up in a quiet domestic life. I become a woman, then a plant, then a dog sniffing other dog butts which now each visually exude a different aura. As the dog, I have the most mobility and find a way to leave the house. I look over at a scrap computer, and then I become it.
I see the world through computer vision, drawing rectangles with fascination identifying objects in the world around me. Back on the escalator again eventually, I look across as and see a ghost. Suddenly I am a ghost on a train platform, waiting to board a train.
Other ghosts on the train are feeling the world differently, there’s a smiling one, a displeased one - scowling, one is staring out of the windows constantly. I get to experience life from each of their point of view when I linger too long observing each of them. The train pulls into the station - at the top of a building I eventually meet a special gecko and reach a selection of eyeballs. Flying over tiny rocks, blinking at me like soot sprites, hatching into smaller rocks, I look into the eyes of some kind of biblically accurate angel. Then everyone in the world dies, we all ascend as skeletal remains. It is a time-dilated afternoon of just: Becoming. Becoming someone else just by staring into their eyes for long enough.
— — —
Austin gets so hot that in the summer the garages start melting, J tells me. The man handing out juice and water at the lounge has a beautiful face, but with frowns etched into it as though he was always plagued by worry, his expressions like Munch wood carvings.
The final days of the festival, we spend the sweaty afternoon in an auditorium away from the city center, stepping into a room as it completely darkens. A disembodied voice asks, I have a question for you - if society collapsed, like tomorrow, do you know in which direction you would start walking? Over the course of the next half hour the room grows darker and darker, we crouch on the floor in blackness and strings of lights illuminate like stars twinkling corresponding to words echoing around the room. We live through a sped-up version of a life being looked back on, the distinct feeling of cassette tapes encasing dying reflections, the hours spent doing everything and nothing, speeding lovingly toward a crashing end. “It’s hard to know who we we are when we don’t know what mirrors we’re looking into,” the voice says. “When we lose the things that we think make us us. And when we don’t always get to say goodbye to the things that leave.”
—-
The conference closes with Bryan Johnson taking us through a guided meditation. I stand on one leg, holding onto my opposite earlobe for balance, supposedly a test for longevity that I think I was failing. There was a strange allure to witnessing this creature, insecure but overcompensating, a delicate vampire in denial and desperately clinging to a set of validating beliefs. He makes some interesting points, we could be the first generation to actually not die - and that sleeping for less than four hours in a night is physiologically identical to a traumatic brain injury, which I can definitely believe.
I drink a non-alcoholic beer in a night garden with C and he tries to talk me down from leaving America. “You could try just leaving the city,” he says.
Historically, most music from Montreal has been great so I hover around the bands’ showcase but internally, I am always measuring all of them against the Arcade Fire. I walk away with my newest discovery, Bon Enfant, coming the closest.
Late at night, I go see Twin Shadow playing in a church. It’s underwhelming. I’m still thinking of what left my heart shivering - walking into what I thought was a DJ set, only to be faced with a tiny crowded room and - a sweating shirtless bespectacled man with fists clenched screaming “Some. Beauty. Just. ANNIHILATES.” Over and over and over again, penetrating the escalating wall of sound.
The streets are always busy as I’m walking home late at night. A man in a Madvillain mask holds up a cardboard placard saying ‘You’re hot’.
——
“I’m flying back into the hellscape,” I tell my family on the phone, resigned, sipping canned water on the sunny rooftop at the airport. My father tells me I have to be like a solar cell, to use these moments I can come up for air, preserve some light to carry me through the darker situations ahead.
Somehow I spend 25 hours on the flight back, plagued by hurricanes. I visit all the hotel lobbies outside Newark airport from three to four AM and then return to the airport to nap in a lounge chair, listen to a Clairo song on repeat for hours, and fall asleep texting my best friend.
The next morning, I land and they have lost my luggage again. I run to the ballet. I arrive just in time, I’ve been pregaming this my entire life. I look over at the violinists arranged in concentric arcs, the one nervous man in the horn section practicing the same tricky bridge section to himself.
I love the sound of the orchestra warming up.