The film that freed our minds at the switch of the millennium, The Matrix’ s conversations around digital and analogue freedom, alternate realities and identity dysmorphia sparked memes, myth and legend, changing the way we think about AI, and the internet, forever.
Like The Matrix, Arca’s forthcoming KICK ii, KicK iii and kick iiii albums lift the veil on the Venezuelan producer’s expansive inner and outer worlds, featuring collabs with the likes of Shygirl, Rosalía and Björk. Here, she goes down the rabbit hole with Aleksandar Hemon, co-writer of the saga’s latest entry, The Matrix Resurrections, to make sense of two years of pandemic, and a world on the cusp of truth.
Which pill is it going to be?
The late novelist and poet Ursula K Le Guin once told an interviewer of her discomfort with being referred to as a science fiction writer: “Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over. My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.” The minds and multiple, metaphorical limbs of thinkers like Le Guin flex into the future to imagine sublime worlds humanity and technology have yet to harness. I use ‘sublime’ in the sense of the sublime art theory that Wordsworth, Burke and Kant built upon, where speculative futures imagined by art can be noble, splendid and absolutely terrifying.
The Matrix arrived on the cusp of a new millennium and articulated this widespread sense of wonder and fear in technological advances. Filmmakers Lilly and Lana Wachowski’s sci-fiepic interrogated nascent anxieties about hacking, computers, a Y2K bug-bitten world and artificial intelligence, while also pointing to the possibilities for dual, digital identities and rebuilding societies bolstered by personal freedoms and liberation. The Matrix amassed a cult following, created its own vocabulary and a legacy that traverses pop culture from fashion to contemporary film, and inventors conceiving new technologies in its image.
Though its themes have remained pertinent over the last two decades, now, in 2021, and approaching The Matrix Resurrection release, that liminal historical space pulsates. Nearly two years since Covid struck, our digital existence overshadows our physical selves more than ever, and workers have untethered themselves from offices to work remotely online. What’s more, as writer Andrea Long Chu declared in her 2019 book, Females: A Concern, The Matrix can be acknowledged as an allegory for transgender life. “Neo has dysphoria. The Matrix is the gender binary. The agents are transphobia,” she wrote, suggesting that the red pill symbolises hormone therapy. There’s the possibility of kinship and community with Morpheus’s crew, the chance to build new, tangible worlds and live out identities long stunted like Neo/Thomas Anderson. Lilly Wachowski confirmed this herself in 2020, when she expressed happiness that it had been recognised – society today feels more ready for this transformative power.
The music of Venezuelan artist, producer and singer Arca AKA Alejandra Ghersi similarly weaves through our collective lexicon, pop culture and art. Ghersi is set to follow up last year’s release with parts ii, iii and iiii – the four albums combining to thrillingly stretch pop structures and interpolate genres from reggaeton to bubblegum and electro. Through them, we experience Arca’s various self-states, the narrative influenced by her experiences as a trans non-binary woman, digital duality, and the complexities of love, sexuality and gender. She is fiercely open-hearted about what both pop and personhood can be, with a belief in transformation,.
