FKA twigs has returned with another issue of her Instagram zine AVANTgarden. This time, her gaze is fixed upon the future of society – or rather, its lack of.
Christened “MEATSPACE”, a press release explains that the issue takes the form of a “graphic motion novel,” telling the story of a dystopian future where hostile AI has slaughtered the human race. The only survivors of this massacre are artists, who the machines want to use to understand and exploit humanity.
“MEATSPACE” is the result of a collaboration between twigs and electronic music auteur Oneohtrix Point Never (Daniel Lopatin), with the main character of the story and saviour of humanity based on twigs herself. Lopatin explained to twigs that she was the real-life embodiment of the main character and from there, created stories about her life in the zine.
twigs went on to develop the characters of “MEATSPACE” with illustrator Icky H, who she had first discovered through Instagram. “I was really touched by his representation of how superheroes could look and feel,” twigs says on what drew her to the illustrator how important it is that anomalie is a non-white, non-male superhero. “I could see myself in the strength of his characters, in a way that I hadn’t identified with a protagonist before.”
The “MEATSPACE” project also has several similarities to Lopatin’s newest album as Oneohtrix Point Never, Age Of, particularly the narrative of Artificial Intelligence at the end of the world. As he explained to us recently, the album loosely tells the story of “the end of the universe, and the only thing left is these AI who are gods. They have all the answers, and what they want is to actually be dumb, like us.”
“MEATSPACE” follows on from the previous two issues AVANTgarden, the first focusing on braided hair, and the second containing a poem by twigs that was interwoven through the entire issue. The zine is available through Instagram because, as twigs told us on the launch of the first issue, “rather than posting selfies or pictures of your cups of coffee or avocado toast, I thought it would be exciting to see people using it in more of a creative way to express themselves.”
Check out the issue on Instagram and see a preview below.
