Cyberpunk for the 21st Century: ONF’s “Sukhumvit Swimming”
If I write about a K-pop group, chances are I have been a fan of them for a while. This is not the case for ONF. M-Net’s Road to Kingdom brought this group to my attention, and though I checked out some of their work it is the sextet’s latest comeback, Spin-Off, hooked me to them. The title track for this mini album is “Sukhumvit Swimming”, a tropical house track with a touch of ONF’s signature heavy synths and guitar. The MV continues ONF’s science fiction-inspired scenarios and hones them down to a particular subgenre (my favourite)—cyberpunk. I wouldn’t label any k-pop concept as through-and-through cyberpunk until now, but “Sukhumvit Swimming” borrows and adds enough to that subgenre to be considered a part of that class of literature. The MV borrows from cyberpunk in spirit and setting but combines them in fascinating new ways.
“Sukhumvit Swimming” by ONF on Woolim Entertainment’s YouTube Channel
Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction that came around in the 1980s and was fascinated by hacker culture. It was was thinking about the Internet, bodily augmentations, AI, mind uploads, all in the setting of dystopian cityscapes were corporates ruled the world. The Cyberpunk archetype is a hacker who uses the oppressive technology of the corporate to figure out the flows of late capital and direct them to his (usually, the protagonists are, unfortunately, male) goal: freedom. The “technology” is generally an Internet-like technology, and hence the “cyber”. The cyberpunk also hacks systems like the cityscape to fight corporate domination. The “punk” came from the rebellious and stylish punk-rocker, and it denotes cyberpunk’s fascination with the power of leather-clad, heavily-mascara-ed punk-pop culture. Neuromancer by William Gibson, Schismatrix by Bruce Sterling, Wetware by Rudy Rucker, and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner are some works that found the tradition in the West. Altered Carbon by Richard K Morgan, The Matrix, and Westworld kept it alive in later decades. Ghost in the Shell, Akira, PsychoPass, Serial Experiments: Lain are some iconic works from Japan that have pushed boundaries for the subgenre. Amidst its neon landscapes, grubby alleyways, gore, and shiny machinery, cyberpunk asks a simple question: what place do we, humans and individuals, have in this “global village” of money and information? Each cyberpunk finds their own answer, and the city always plays an important role in this discovery.
Wyatt rides a tuk-tuk in cyberspace
So, where is Sukhumvit in “Sukhumvit Swimming”? The only thing remotely related to Thailand in the MV seems to be the tuk-tuk that Wyatt drives through a CGI cyberspace landscape. At first glance, even this is jarring—why would one drive a tuk-tuk through cyberspace? The answer is: why not? “Sukhumvit Swimming” insists on mixing the local with the global. The cyberpunk always stays true to their roots even as they dive into popular culture. Cyberspace, in most cyberpunk, is a visual fest where one can look like whatever they want. If one wants to traverse it with a tuk-tuk, so be it. In a way, all the six settings in the MV are Sukhumvit. They are all a bizarre mix of human-nonhuman, past-future, real-unreal, categories that cyberpunk always confuses to question their boundaries. This confusion allows cyberpunk to figure out, in distinct ways, how an individual’s life is embedded in global capital.
These androids are hella creepy. This sequence seems heavily inspired by Westworld, a cyberpunk work set in an amusement park where artificially intelligent android “hosts” gain sentience and rebel against the abuse that the human guests of the park have practiced on the androids for year.
Each setting of the MV evokes Sukhumvit as a tool, and it is what makes “Sukhumvit Swimming” a clever study of cyberpunk. The first setting is Hyojin’s 1920s American railroad. Whether we are to think of the “people” on board with Hyojin as literal androids or grotesquely mechanised human beings, there are disturbingly few differences between androids and people working like clockwork to their schedules in a metropolis. Our cowboy is different from the rest of the occupants on this train; he is not dressed in the stuffy clothes of these robots—he is a (console?) cowboy, a punk, a rebel.
Hyojin as the cowboy.
U, too, seems to be on this train, but he is, well, high. He drinks a bright blue liquid from a glass and things start to swim. With time stopping and MK floating in space, questioning the reality of our disparate, mediate, postmodern existence should not be too difficult for us. In fact, stimulants of various kinds are an integral part of cyberpunk. Apart from their performance-enhancing effects, drugs are always connected to altering/understanding reality much like the technology of the cyberpunk universe.
Kids, don’t do drugs.
Is the virtual world, where we are all information, more real than our world, where we are just expressions of biology? Is the train that U is on real? The minute U consumes that glass, “reality” is up for grabs[1].
The second major setting of this MV features J-US in the sunburnt ruins of Greek columns and skyscrapers.
J-US’ suburnt world. Blade Runner 2049 has very similar visuals to this post-apocalyptic world.
This odd, out-of-time combination is another reason why “cyberpunk” jumped to my mind. Cyberpunk likes to juxtapose history with the present times and ask: what is the place of history in a time when technology has skewed our perception of time? The anxiety of technophobes is often that these revered worlds like the cradle of Western Civilisation will be forgotten. The survival of these cultures without context—just stone columns in sunbaked worlds—reminds us of the tyranny of the object. Long after humans are gone (extinct or only alive in a virtual world), these traces of us will be left. Until then, we can only absorb and re-write these monuments into our present alongside the skyscrapers of the capitalist world—much like the pastiche cityscape of Sukhumvit.
E-Tion is on the moon. The moon landing was faked, btw. Or was it?
E-Tion’s moon landing is a particularly strange setting. The others, in one way or another, can be found on earth, but why is E-Tion on the moon? Distance and travel in this MV are unstable concepts. If one can travel through cyberspace in a tuk-tuk, one can definitely grow flowers on the moon. In a patchwork fantasy world (like Sukhumvit), anything is possible. More than that, scale is another notion “Sukhumvit Swimming” is determined to throw in the trash. When virtual worlds are accessible to us through stimulants and technology, the moon is no longer the symbol of extraordinary achievement or emotion (“shoot for the moon,” it is said). Even the moon can be subsumed in the network of capitalism--just ask Elon Musk.
MK really reminds me of the Master here.
The only setting we are now left with is MK’s scenario with the mysterious machine. It could be the machine that is responsible for these strange visions; it certainly looks like the Twelfth Doctor’s time-travelling machine, the TARDIS, from BBC’s Doctor Who. Perhaps it is even one of the machines from The Matrix, that are determined to keep humans as only bio-powered cells for the energy they can provide (bio-powered batteries would not generate enough energy, by the way. That’s one of the flaws in the Wachowskis’ reasoning). Strangely enough, no-one touches the machine; MK disappears from the scene towards the end of the MV, leaving the machine perpetually working. The machine never stops and the dreamers (assuming that there is a particular “real” world) will not wake up—unless, of course, something brings them out of the illusion.
That brings me to the “storyline” of this MV. There is certainly one, mixed within the fantastic shots of this MV. All the members start from different settings but towards the end, they all arrive in the desert that J-US started from. The trigger? Hyojin readies his gun to shoot at J-US in quite a memorable scene:-
I said this MV likes to mess with scale, didn’t I?
Unexpectedly, Hyojin is the one who is shot. All the members snap out of their “illusions” and end up in the desert with J-US. Everyone is dying or has at least passed out, except J-US who has been in this setting since the beginning. The cyberpunks come together, out of their illusion—or perhaps into one. Time unfreezes and Hyojin is nowhere to be seen on the train. Our cyberpunks have lived and fought in the blink of an eye (or rather, the three-odd minutes that the MV lasts) to disappear with no trace. Fast, suave, and unreal, the cyberpunk is gone once the fight is over. But what have they achieved?
The cyberpunk cityscape is the place for the rebel to explore the strings of corporate domination. In the case of cyberpunk, relations are usually technologies embedded in the logic of capitalism. When ONF creates a temporary Sukhumvit on our screens, they tie together the disparate scenarios of the MV. Now, the hidden relations that linked the moon to a spaghetti Western train and post-apocalyptic world can be read.
If all the members end up in a dystopian, suntanned terrain, it is because this is where all history leads. “Sukhumvit Swimming” is a slow but certain dive of the world into a spiral of destruction there is no coming back from, a process of the destruction of the world that begins slowly but certainly from the days when human beings began to abuse fossil fuels. The trains, the tuk-tuks, the rockets of “Sukhumvit Swimming” are as much a part of the process as the fireworks that explode in front of E-Tion’s moon.
When the MV ends, Time begins its work again, moving inexorably towards the end. Sukhumvit is a tool to understand how the flows of global capital have isolated humans (and even technology) into our own fantastical worlds, worlds as small as our phone screens, without seeing our connections to the outside world. Our work is to make/find our Sukhumvit, our tool for understanding our place in these networks that seem to mysteriously guide our lives. The cyberpunk has disappeared, but there is someone that still remains: it is you, and your battle has just begun.
[1] Stealing this expression from Cavallaro, Dani. Cyberpunk and Cyberculture: Science Fiction and the Works of William Gibson, pp. 38.
