Anyone who knows a gen-alpha kid is well aware of the massive presence Roblox still has. The dissonant combination of creativity (players design and share their own games) and exploitation (Roblox Corporation, which reported $3.6 billion in revenue last year, profits off that unpaid labor) is already emblematic of the horrors of late-stage capitalism, but the other day I discovered a new aberration when a young library patron asked for help logging in to the game. I immediately saw that the barrier was the most convoluted CAPTCHA I’ve ever come across. It instructed the user to click through a series of ten images to select the cup with the most liquid that also matched the given symbol… TEN TIMES. It took me, a grown adult (debatable, I’ll admit), several minutes to figure it out, during which time something we’ve always known but tend to ignore became unignorable: we are now human data feeders for predatory algorithms. This absurd reality is the impetus for CAPTCHA, an audiovisual collaboration between multimedia artist Berto Herrera, producer Manao (a.k.a. Oswaldo Rodríguez), and graphic designer Shamma Buhazza. It’s one of the more ambitious submissions that’s come into the inbox this year, and while I’m usually turned off by fancy press releases and headshots, it’s great that the concept was taken so seriously and this much work was put in.
The composition itself is a single hour-long suite of bleak repetition and synthetic atmosphere, owing its lurching pseudo-rhythms and digital intricacies to Rodríguez’s background in club music and its emotional dynamics to Herrera’s eye (and ear) for abstract sublimity. It’s part mood piece and part main attraction, at home in both the background and the foreground—which, in fact, represents the same blurring of boundaries as the “endless shadow economy” it critiques. Those contradictions abound throughout all elements of the project, whether it’s the dark beauty we’re reluctant to recognize in the music (that’s inevitably torn apart by a recurring synthesized voice instructing us to PLEASE TYPE THE NUMBERS YOU HEAR) or the dual consumerist/aesthetic urge to purchase the physical editions of the release: twenty tapes with handmade collage covers and seven handmade hollow “river stones” housing SD cards, both of which feature Buhazza’s visual contributions. I’m reminded of the packaging for Seth Cooke’s Selected Works for No-Input Field Recorder, and I’m also led to ask similar questions—and acknowledge a similar futility in trying to answer them. CAPTCHA strikes back against the descending big-tech boot with a glimmer of hope for “a return to spaces of silence and human connection”… but is a glimmer enough? It sounds like it, at least.
Noise Not Music 