Virtual Machine: Sub-Cultures

I like the way that when Japanese do sub-culture, they don’t hold back or go anything like half-way. All the cultural references here are solid 1978 London in contemporary Tokyo.

Sub-cultures fascinate me. Those little tidal swirls and eddies in time to which minds and memories become attached. The sub-culture is a simulation, an abstraction of second-order, self-conscious replication. Sub-cultural instances and implementations can be like virtual machines running embedded within an encapsulating social and cultural operating system. These can be considered partial references of another time and place, complete within themselves as fulfilling the requirements and internal or borrowed logic of their own unique rules, context and meaning. Partial references like this indirectly remind us that all cultures (no less than all experiences of time and place) are intimately of partial or incomplete and fictional or fabricated reference. All cultures are woven from fundamentally reinterpreted and abstract, symbolic representations of reality; sub-cultures remind us of the endless games we play with ourselves (and each other) and through which we seek to ascribe meanings and reasons to things.

“己が火を　木々に蛍や　花の宿”
– Basho